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Comment by veddox | Hacker News Reader

LibreOffice is a pain if you want to do anything that looks remotely attractive. MS Office, unfortunately, wins hands down at that (and at general usability and power).

Being unable to use MS Office was one of my big regrets of working on Linux for a long time. When I finally learnt LaTeX, that at least removed the need for Word ;-) (Although I still miss PowerPoint, LO Impress really doesn't impress me very much at all.)

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I find that remarkjs (https://github.com/gnab/remark) has removed a big class of situations where I previously needed PowerPoint.

And has the advantage that videos actually work reliably.

This is an important point and a really big advantage as I've painfully found out over the years when videos have not worked as intended.

How do you feel about the Beamer class for LaTeX? I suspect it's better than Impress (I strive to not actually prepare slideshows in life, but I don't always manage to).

I've dipped into it, but haven't had the opportunity to do much with it yet. My impression is that it's fantastic for preparing academic presentations (where it's all about the content and you want to be able to create some decent equations), but not necessarily what I would use to create a fancy product pitch or anything like that.

Beamer is nice if you have a few weeks on your hands to spare. :P If you need to throw together a presentation for 3 days from now and you don't already know exactly what it should look like I wouldn't recommend it.

I rarely have to do presentations and know little of latex but gave beamer a try recently when I had a presentation to do. It's very simple syntax and I learned nearly everything I needed in a couple of hours.

The last time I used powerpoint (several years ago) I found the learning curve much higher and even after I started getting the hang of things had to keep fighting it for stuff like code snippets.

Throw in a makefile with an inotifywait watcher and you've got a WYSIWYG interface.

Give WPS Office a go on Linux... it's been the most similar to MS Office I've found (in terms of both file format and UI).

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