[nness]

I work in an organisation that does pitch decks, many incredibly designed pitch decks, all on Google Slides, and each and every point here is painfully valid.

Why is indentation in physical units and not points... and why is that linked to the language... and why can I not do 0.05 inches but I can do 0.05cm? Its all nonsense.

All that said, the collaborative editing features of Google Docs in general are so good, its almost worth the rest of the crud.

[vulcan01]

Don't PowerPoint[0] and Keynote also have collaborative editing? What is better about Google Slides' collaborative features?

[0]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/share-and-collabo...

[1]: https://support.apple.com/guide/keynote/intro-to-collaborati...

[HillRat]

PowerPoint collaboration is … interesting, and gets more interesting as people mix web, Windows, and Mac apps simultaneously, and as the number of people on a single deck increases (which seems like an edge case, but more than once I’ve had up to thirty-odd people in a deck editing and observing right up to a proposal submission deadline). Versions are prone to race conditions, data gets lost, and each version of PP imposes its own weird idiosyncrasies on the deck. Even so, it’s still the best of the slideware builders; if I didn’t have Office I’d probably fall back to LibreOffice; then Indesign; then Keynote; then paper and pencil; and then consider cuneiform or cave paintings. After that, I’d probably consider Slides, but only if the client rejected a proposal to present through the collective medium of slam poetry and interpretive dance.

[Closi]

As someone that heavily uses PowerPoint collaboration - I would say that it's got a lot better and keeps getting better. It's not perfect, but it's much better than it was two years ago (and the number of conflicts keep coming down).

But yes - much better than Google Docs, which has some frankly bizarre limitations each time I try to use it.

Excel collaboration on the other hand... good luck! (I suspect an application of the complexity of Excel just won't be able to be easily made collaborative... Google Sheets manages it, however it is a much simpler app that can handle less data and has much less functionality).

[johnwalkr]

Microsoft’s collaboration tools seem designed to ensure no matter what, every file will end up in multiple places online and as multiple local copies. Click a link in MS teams chat. Are you working in one person’s weird sharepoint without them even knowing they are using sharepoint? Company sharepoint? Onedrive? Nobody knows. Oops, you don’t have permission to edit anyway and the sharer doesn’t know how to add you. Congratulations now you are owner of the local file presentation-v2_JW-comments.pptx. When you drag that back into teams, now it’s on your weird personal sharepoint that you yourself didn’t even know existed.

Oh, your company trained everyone how to make sure all files are on the company sharepoint? Not going to stick because the online versions lack extremely basic features like copy-paste that works reliably and “merge cells”. You can open online files in the desktop app, but you’ll soon be back to a local copy because working online in the desktop app is unusable for things like “dragging a text box around”.

iCloud collaboration works fine in my experience but only on Macs which makes it a non-starter for most companies. And can you even have have a company-wide iCloud files system, or can you only share individual files with people?

[bobbylarrybobby]

Does iCloud collaboration not work in a browser, through icloud.com? I'm pretty sure it does.

You can't do folder sharing though which is definitely a non starter for most orgs.

[johnwalkr]

It does but I think in general MS products will be more attractive to a mixed (PC/Mac) organization than iCloud. It's virtually impossible in most industries to not have to work with MS Office documents with external parties (and internal, good luck hiring legal or accounting people and telling them they can only use icloud).

Even though I really prefer google drive to anything else, it also suffers from this problem, too. Even if it were perfect at editing native Office documents, you still inevitably end up with people saving files as office documents and working locally for both legitimate and illegitimate reasons.

[snarkyturtle]

Yep, all the warts are totally forgotten the moment you have to use Powerpoint or Keynote again and have to coordinate with changes with multiple people.