NickFanion

Playing nice with Excel (and PowerPoint) is an underrated feature. The next step I see from business users is taking the formatted Excel table and pasting it into a PowerPoint slide. The hacker mindset often says the Microsoft Office suite is the wrong tool for the job, so we should use X tool and Y process instead. That may be true, but there's so much institutional inertia at established organizations that it's hard to completely abandon the Office suite. Anything that lets a technical user do something programmatically, but allows the output to be easily manipulated by a non-expert is invaluable.

I've had success generating svg visuals and placing them in slides, which PPT treats as a "shape" (the Graphics Format ribbon appears), and business users like that they can modify the shapes (for example, change the color). Great Tables supports pdf export, but not svg. I just tested a pdf vector in the current version of PPT, and while it maintains the vector, PPT won't let me convert it to a shape (only the Picture Format ribbon is available). Great Tables doesn't seem to support svg export directly, so there needs to be an additional pdf -> svg conversion.

Yes, I can't read this either. Also, consider using a sequential color scale, rather than diverging. A diverging color scale should be reserved for datasets with a neutral value or natural midpoint. For example, if you were displaying growth, zero would be the midpoint, to quickly differentiate between positive/negative growth.

There is no meaningful midpoint here. A sequential scale from light to dark would be easier to read.

You’re making a good point, but I don’t think this is fair to AirPlay. You don’t need an Apple TV to use AirPlay. My LG TV supports AirPlay. I recently stayed at an Airbnb with a TV running Roku OS. It supported AirPlay as well. Sonos and various other speakers and AV equipment support audio-only AirPlay.

When AirPlay launched in 2010, Google Cast didn’t exist. EDIT: TV manufacturers only started adding AirPlay (now “AirPlay 2”) in 2019. Still, I think it’s reasonable to expect a modern device, without extra hardware, to support AirPlay.

Luckily I haven't had to use those desktop apps in 7 years, and today everything is through their web portal + .csv exports. Export restrictions still apply, but at least it's a standard format.

Thank you - you've described exactly what I try to do every day. This year has felt especially painful, which is why I made this post. I'll stay persistent and keep looking for the weird solutions!

This is a huge help, thank you. I've been using the Postman Interceptor extension, but OpenAPI-devtools looks tailor made for my use case. The hard part will still be figuring out the auth headers/calls (EDIT: the dev has added auth support since the HN post!)

My pain point with these tools has been that my presentation ultimately ends up in the hands of business users, and they expect an editable PowerPoint. This includes native charts/visuals/tables. They don't like giving up control and get frustrated if a chart is an image or an SVG shape. Even when these tools export to PowerPoint, there is no native chart capability.

PowerPoint does support inserting SVG files. Microsoft added SVG support a few years ago, but it might only be available for 365 subscribers.