TIL a Cool PowerPoint Designer Hack

I don’t consider myself creative or artistic. The artistic bias probably goes back to school, where the requirement of an art elective ruined my chances at a 4.0 grade average (and exemplified by my Featured Image attempts, which even AI can’t seem to help me with).

The creative bias is that I usually can’t do it on demand. I’ve also learned that if you get out of your own way, creativity happens fairly naturally. This is similar to how Douglas Adams describes how one learns to fly. Anyway, one way to get over a lack of creativity and artistic sense is to let AI tools do it for you, and one that I find really handy for my handicap is PowerPoint Designer. (For those who think Designer isn’t AI, marketing is clearly doing it’s job, and perhaps missing the point, and here is proof— as long as the link is valid).

Personally, I don’t mind boring slides. I actually like have really basic slides where the purpose of the slide is for people to remember what we’re talking about when their minds inevitably wander. But, sometimes I am creating slides for other people, or need to meet the expectations of people with different opinions on the matter, so I need to make them a bit less boring, and designer is a great way to do that. One frustration I have with designer is that it so often gives me this message: Microsoft PowerPoint Designer "Sorry" message.

Usually this can be fixed by simplifying the slide, i.e., remove the cool graphic you added and let it focus on the text. Or you can split the graphic and text into separate slides and then combine the results after the magic happens.

Oh, and one word of caution: Copy your original slide before letting Designer have its way with it, because sometimes the new formatting is no longer easy to copy and paste.

Back to the cool hack part. My second annoyance with Designer, after it apologizing for having no suggestion of how to improve my work that clearly needs improvement, is that it gives so few suggestions. This seems to have gotten worst, and I suspect it is because those data centers are saving cycles for the AI that the marketing folks are calling AI. Recently, it was only giving me four or five options, many of which were just minot variations on the themes, like this:

PowerPoint suggestions for a slide with plain bullets.
PowerPoint suggestions for a slide with plain bullets.

I wasn’t too thrilled with any of the options, but I picked one just to move on and make some progress. Maybe an AI image would spruce it up enough (in the end, it did). Being the paranoid person who has lost early versions that I wished I could go back to, I made a copy first. Usually, when I make a copy, I start working in the copy. But this time, for no particular reason, I went back to the original…where Designer was showing entirely new options based on it’s own modification:

PowerPoint Designer suggestions after accepting a suggestion.
PowerPoint Designer suggestions after accepting a suggestion.

It seemed I had accidently cracked the code to get more options, like in the good ole days before everyone was using these tools, too. Just to prove my theory, I tried repeating the process, and sure enough…

PowerPoint Designer Keeps on Designing
PowerPoint Designer Keeps on Designing

I didn’t really find  an end to variations, though I admit that the quality of options generally declined, with an occasional interesting one coming up here and there. Full disclosure: this may have just been the raw material I started with, but that is back to my bias against my own creativity.

So, that’s my big discovery for the day. Well, there were really more, but I have to get back to “real work”, until this writing stuff actually starts paying some bills. Forward this to your friends (or enemies) if you would like to contribute to this hobby.

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© Scott S. Nelson
Intro to Bard

My introduction to Bard

Semantic clarification: I’m not introducing you, reader, to Bard. This is my experience of being introduced to Bard.

The answer to my first question, probably way too Turing-ish, shows that Bard is slow on the uptake as to context. I asked “What is the best use of Bard?” and received a description of the Dungeons and Dragons role.

What is the best use of Bard?
What is the best use of Bard?

Points for the honesty of Bard, because this is very different from the description from the email confirming my access, which described Bard as “…your creative and helpful collaborator, here to supercharge your imagination, boost your productivity, and bring your ideas to life.

I was disappointed. The makers of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves should be disappointed it didn’t display an add along with the response (how much you wanna bet the GA version will?). I gave similar feedback to Bard and moved to my next question.

My next question was “Which is better: ChatGPT or Bard?” The response was interesting. It didn’t rise to the bait of “my dog’s better than your dog” (yes, I’m that old) and gave a good answer that you can read for yourself in the screenshot and that I will summarize as ChatGPT will do your homework and Bard will do your Googling for you.

Which is better: ChatGPT or Bard?
Which is better: ChatGPT or Bard?

But how good is Bard at Googling? Having used Google since it’s year of inception, and having struggled for many years with its predecessors, I feel fairly adept at searching on Google. I worded my next query the way I would (will?) write the actual requirement for a project I’m working on: “What is the best ReactJS compatible image viewer with vector markup capability that can be stored in PostgresSQL?

What is the best ReactJS compatible image viewer with vector markup capability that can be stored in PostgresSQL?
What is the best ReactJS compatible image viewer with vector markup capability that can be stored in PostgresSQL?

The response was literal and detailed. It described only one product (“Feeling lucky?” anyone) and gave a detailed reason for the recommendation. I will definitely include the recommendation in my comparisons, and decide whether to ask Bard for other options or go back to my normal way of searching.

If you believe the vlogsphere, the push to get Bard operational and in the hands of Google users is the threat of ChatGPT bringing everyone over to B.I.N.G (Because It’s Not Google). For the practical and technical, I think Bard is an excellent response to that threat.  For the majority of folks, I think Bard is going to have a tough time for having come out of the gate this late.

And then…

After posting the first revision of this article I went back to continue the vector library search. Interestingly, while I can see the questions (aka prompts) that I had asked previously, I cannot access the answers. Glad I took screen shots, because after pasting in the same question I received a different response. This wasn’t too surprising as I have heard ChatGPT users have the same experience. Wanting a quick finish to the task, I then asked for the top 5 options. The first of the 5 was the same as the response in this request, but the suggestion given the first time was not in the top 5. Makes me curious what changed in 45 minutes for the first option that was the best to no longer be in the top 5?

And then #1 was never heard from again
And then #1 was never heard from again
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© Scott S. Nelson

Catch a Wave

Reading The enterprise implications of Google Wave over on ZDNet, I find the article really well done. I do have a nit to pick with one comment:

“With Google’s tendency to emphasize the consumer world first and the enterprise later, it’s also valid to ask if Wave will really have much impact on businesses.”

My observation has been that most computing technology innovations start in the business market and flounder around until consumers catch on to it.  Then again, he may just be saying that for his set up, as his next sentence is:

“Interestingly, you might be surprised at some of the answers, so let’s take a look.”

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© Scott S. Nelson