[d3Xt3r]

> I recently tried Claude Cowork for PowerPoint and I was stunned by the content as well as design quality of the deck it produced. That's a threat for Microsoft because now you don't need the editing tools of PowerPoint, AI replaces it, so all you need is the presentation mode of PowerPoint.

Actually, someone here posted a Claude Code skill recently that generates a presentation as a self-contained HTML5 file, so all you need is a browser.

PowerPoint, as a whole, is doomed.

[hgoel]

Powerpoint will continue to persist because other people need to be able to edit your slide deck without understanding your HTML.

My employer blocks office plugins, so I can't try Claude for PowerPoint, but sometimes I get Claude to generate Python scripts, which produce PowerPoint slides via python-pptx. This also benefits from being able to easily read and generate figures from raw data.

I don't really like the way Claude tends to format slides (too much marketing speak and flowcharts), but it has good ideas often enough that it's still worth it to me. So I treat this as a starting point and replace the bad parts.

[basch]

Or you could just talk to powerpoint, which creates a self contained pptx, which also plays anywhere.

we've hit this point where its cool to have claude reinvent every wheel just because it can.

[d3Xt3r]

It's not self-contained, it requires PowerPoint to be indfled. Which is not an issue on corporate machines of course, but maybe you want to do a presentation for a general/broader audience.

[alternatex]

Office, or rather Microsoft 365 applications have had web versions for a decade now.

[d3Xt3r]

That's besides the point though. With a self-contained HTML, you don't need to go to a special website, you don't need an account or sign-in, heck you don't even need the Internet, and it works pretty much on every device that supports HTML5.

[basch]

a solution in search of a problem. everyone can open a powerpoint in google docs, hotmail, libreoffice etc.

now the person receiving the file has a DIFFERENT experience than they are used to with every other presentation. different hotkeys, different troubleshooting.

[jason_zig]

I'm not sure that's true - try getting someone to pull up an html5 file on their computer for a presentation...

[DrSAR]

hrm, double-click and your browser does the rest.

For added benefit, full screen?

Until you need presenter notes or other niceties, this covers a large space of usage.

[raincole]

You mean like, double-click?

[apsurd]

you must never have actually done this. it doesn't work the way you think it does. unless it's self contained (like a pp), you can't expect network access to actually deliver when you need it most.

[d3Xt3r]

The file the Claude skill spits out is actually fully self-contained, no network access is needed.

[apsurd]

that's pretty cool!

[apsurd]

you could do that for the past 20 years. i've always hated slides as a medium for anything, but i've been proven wrong tine and again that people love their pp.

[bad_haircut72]

Because it was drag and drop interface. This existed for HTML but because web pages got too complicated, so did the WYSIWYGs. By just being a program to show slides, the editing experience was manageable for anyone. But if you can hust type what you want to happen into claude, editng experience doesnt matter as much/at all

[usrme]

I'd love to get a link to that comment/post!

[d3Xt3r]

https://github.com/shawnzam/keynot