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.
A success I've had is building datasets from the electronic data interchange (EDI) transmissions we receive. EDI is an old standard, and everyone implements it slightly differently, but Stedi (https://www.stedi.com) has made it simple for me to turn EDI into JSON. Like you said though, there are still folks using paper receipts/PDFs.
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!)
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.