Why doesn’t Microsoft just merge Powerpoint and Excel completely into a single app?
Thoughts, or tips/best practices for managing in the meantime?
As background, I’m currently an analytics monkey who lives 24/7 in excel, but most of the communication of my results is in Powerpoint.
Now I know you can open up instances of excel in powerpoint for charting and even embed an excel file in powerpoint, but it’s pretty lame from a user perspective, the reverse would have been far better. Every analyst I know builds their huge excel models (somtimes over 10 MB) and then has to figure out how to port their charts, etc to powerpoint via copy/paste. Linking the two is often avoided because the files can get separated and links broken and it’s usually not worth the hassle and risk for 1-time presentations. On the flip side, ctrl-c and ctrl-v is very tedious if there are 20 charts and an underlying assumption changes.
What would be more helpful is if Excel could just have a powerpoint feature saved with it, or just have the two open up under the same umbrella program and file. That way, complex models could be built and the powerpoint charting and outputs could be directly linked to excel and always auto-update without worrying about having two files or broken links.
Sorry for the long OP. Got a large project coming up with lots of charts and am hoping there’s a way to slim down the powerpoint piece into something less unnecessarily tedious.
(put this in IMHO just because I don’t think there’s a specific answer and tips are always subjective) Also, I’m working in Office 2007 for what it’s worth.
Why would you want to merge an effective business productivity tool (spreadsheets) with a crappy presentation toy that really shows so many are unable to communicate?
The R/Sweave/Beamer combo does exactly what you want. Build your models in R, hit go, and you get a presentation that automatically incorporates the up-to-date analysis. Use tikzDevice for your graphics, and you never even have to think about anything. The only downside is that there is a little bit of a learning curve involved, but it’s well worth the effort.
I agree with Jack. Excel is a great program. Word is bad, PowerPoint is far worse. Microsoft, please don’t wreck Excel by infecting it with PowerPoint.
I’m not even sure it’s feasible for Microsoft to merge Excel and PowerPoint into one program even if they wanted to do so. Both programs are written in (and manipulated by) VBA, but the language in each programs is different as the sets of operators needed by each is quite specific. For example, the basic building block of an Excel cell in VBA is Workbook.Worksheet.CellAddress.Format (simplifying greatly there, of course), and in PowerPoint it’s…well, who the hell ever programs macros in PowerPoint–certainly not me. Something like Workbook.Slide.DesignFeature.Format. Since the second and third sections of the dot phrase refer to different items, you’d have to find some way to make them fully compatible, and good luck with that.
