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Programming With PowerPoint

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I just watched a video with Tom Wildenhain demonstrating how he is using Microsoft PowerPoint as a graphical programming environment:

Besides the fact that the video has great entertainment value, Tom is demonstrating quite impressively how someone is able to reverse engineer the inner workings of something. In this case, he did a very good job in finding out how Microsoft implemented the morph transition for various objects. This way, you can use PowerPoint to render 3D animations, for example.

I was astonished about handling cyclic dependencies between embedded slides within slides and navigating between them. Building interactive fractals within PowerPoint? Why not!

With that knowledge, he built a Turing Machine in PowerPoint which is actually pretty handy for demonstrating how these machines actually work.

Even if you're not interested in programming in PowerPoint, this fifty minute video shows you hardly known features you can use in your daily PowerPoint life: special transitions, use of high-quality 3D assets, export these 3D assets for using them in other tools, and so forth.

Lastly, he presents the Design Idea feature I noticed myself just a couple of days ago. With this awesome PowerPoint feature you create very high quality slides without any effort. While Microsoft was famous for having the ugliest templates of the market for decades, this is a new killer-feature where the alternatives do not have anything as good as that.

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