The answer is divided into four parts:

  1. The first is to analyze and disassemble the problem. Why is it not easy to do a job presentation PPT for most programs?
  2. The second part is the solution to the problem, mainly tools and logical thinking of two aspects of training
  3. The third part, since it is for programmers, what are the advantages of programmers to do PPT
  4. The last part is summary and outlook. With the development of artificial intelligence technology, it may not be difficult to make PPT well in the future

Why is it so difficult for most programmers to do a powerpoint presentation?

First of all, let’s think about a question: have you found that different people’s PPT levels are very different, but the differences of flow diagrams, mind maps, UML class diagrams and sequence diagrams are relatively small? What’s the difference? Also, think again: why is there so little confusion in the design team about how to do a good POWERPOINT presentation? For example, if you were a programmer and needed to draw flow charts, which software would you choose between Photoshop and Visio? Let’s break down some of the difficulties that programmers face when writing powerpoint:

  1. Unable to find a good template
  2. Not sure what font to use
  3. Don’t know where to find a map
  4. Don’t know how to type
  5. Don’t know how to draw a flowchart in a POWERPOINT presentation
  6. Don’t know how to display code in a powerpoint presentation
  7. .

What is more desperate is that we find that many PPT masters draw beautiful slides by themselves with simple lines and ICONS instead of using advanced tools or modules.

For example, in the slide below, it is easy to use a template to change only the words in the text box, but to draw such a template, you need to use a variety of basic graphics, images, gradients and other basic operations to achieve, such a threshold for the average programmer is not low.

To sum up, we can appreciate that the root cause of programmers’ difficulty in making PPT is that tools like powerpoint/ Keynote are not designed for programmers at all, but for people with art and design skills.

And programmer do work report, need art design skill child skill this thing, obviously is a false proposition. So let’s sum up in a word, the reason why it is difficult for programmers to report their work with PPT is that PPT tool is not suitable for programmers. Short for: Tools are bad to use.

There are two solutions to poor tools

  1. Change the tool
  2. To change yourself

For the general population, it is not easy to find a more useful tool, through training to improve their PPT level, so that they have the ability to control PPT tools is the most important method.

For programmers, it’s worth considering switching to a more convenient tool.

Here we introduce them respectively.

General solution

In the last section, we made it clear that PPT is not a tool designed for programmers, and it is not good to rely on intuition. It requires special learning and repeated practice.

When we learn, we may find that the situation is more pessimistic than we imagined. We want to find fonts and pictures to make PPT more attractive, but we find that most fonts are charged, and high-definition large pictures are basically copyrighted. It makes sense, too, for designers to live up to their expectations.

These difficulties tell us that to do a good PPT, we need to do more than poetry, usually need to accumulate, there is no good shortcut.

  1. Be familiar with the basics of powerpoint/ Keynote and it’s worth taking a course or reading a comprehensive book
  1. For font, pictures, gb and other resources, usually pay more attention to the collection of web sites, by the search engine when receiving a task to prepare often too late
  1. When you see other people’s good PPT design, you can imitate it more. You can perfectly restore the good design and fill it with your own content, which is a level of progress than just using templates

The material is designer-led, not a programmer’s forte. But starting with typography, the designer’s skills are just icing on the cake, and more importantly, logical thinking. Everyone has seen a lot of big movies with great special effects, but they just can’t tell a story. Our layout also serves a purpose.

Logical thinking sounds rather empty, but let’s break it down into three parts:

  1. Structured expression
  2. Speak with the facts
  3. Speak with data

We focus on the topic’s goal, “work report”. Since it is a report, it must have a purpose, either to make achievements in the hope of reward, or to meet difficulties and need help, or to explain why to do so to seek understanding and support.

Either way, state the conclusion first, in a structured way:

In addition to the facts, there should be statistical analysis to prove your reasons and to deduce your conclusions.

This kind of logical derivation by intuition is not enough, you need to learn some relevant knowledge.

For example, there are methods of logical reasoning: deduction and induction.

The deduction method has been popularized by Musk’s theory that everything must be derived from first principles.

You’re getting more and more aware of the limitations of induction. But induction also has its mature theoretical system. For example, if we want to analyze causation, there are the famous “Mueller’s Five methods”.

These methods may not be familiar to programmers, but you should know that they are the logic questions on the MBA entrance exam.

Too much on the subject of dispersion, let’s take the method of surplus, the essence of which is the famous “eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth.” Whether you hear it from Sherlock Holmes, or Conan, or Chinatown detective.

Play to your Programmer’s strengths

With the logical framework in place, it’s just a matter of tools. Finally, it was time to make use of the programmer’s expertise.

PPT is now basically completed independently by designers, but there is almost no designer to put up the design draft on the web. The IDE used by front-end programmers is usually vscode, not wysiwyg.

So why do you have to use powerpoint or Keynote? Can we use front-end technology to write work reports?

Reveal.js (revealjs.com/), for example, is written with a front-end technology for SL…

For example, reveal.js has great support for code.

Let’s take a look at a small example of code highlighting and associated animation, which is not easy to create with powerpoint:

Reveal.js uses HTML and CSS, like this:

With CSS as a weapon, all of a sudden we have a hard waist.

Compared with PPT template, our CSS style library is obviously rich, such as tailwindcss, which is popular in the past two years:

For example, our CSS has an icon library:

future

Finally, let’s look into the future. What PPT needs to do is to visualize information. In fact, only logical thinking can not be replaced by machines and we need to learn it carefully.

ImgCook team, can you put up a pptCook?