Microsoft PowerPoint
Ranked 2 of 11 presentation tools by recommenders
Recommended as a familiar, feature-rich slide tool with animations and Presenter View. Critics say it is buggy, and free rivals like Google Slides are enough.
Recommended as a familiar, feature-rich slide tool with animations and Presenter View. Critics say it is buggy, and free rivals like Google Slides are enough.
97 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 42
- criticize it
- 55
- approval share
- 43%
Recommended in 11 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 42 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 0.7 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 11 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Solid and works fine
“Word and PowerPoint are also very solid.”
Comment from 19 Nov 2025 in “Blender 5.0” “Excel, Powerpoint, Word .... all fine”
Comment from 5 Jan 2026 in “Microsoft Office renamed to "Microsoft 365 Copilot app"” “I used it once for a fancy presentation and it worked fine”
Comment from 20 Dec 2025 in “Immersa: Open-source Web-based 3D Presentation Tool” - Comment from 10 Apr 2026 in “France Launches Government Linux Desktop Plan as Windows Exit Begins”
Animations, transitions and Presenter View
“PowerPoint itself has always supported a lot of powerful options like Presenter View”
Comment from 29 Oct 2026 in “Show HN: SlideBySide – Present slides without sharing your screen” “Powerpoint allows you all kinds of benefits like animations or transitions”
Comment from 10 Dec 2025 in “So you want to speak at software conferences?” Flexible placement of anything
“PowerPoint is probably the replacement because it doesn't restrict where things can be placed”
Comment from 8 Dec 2025 in “Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices” “in PowerPoint they can put things all over the place”
Comment from 9 Dec 2025 in “Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices” Good for lectures and research talks
“I could make 4 lectures notes in PowerPoint, and they were better”
Comment from 16 Nov 2025 in “Writing a book with Quarto” “PowerPoint is the best tool to prepare research presentations”
Comment from 10 Apr 2026 in “France Launches Government Linux Desktop Plan as Windows Exit Begins”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Bugs, data loss and broken slides
“Bluetooth audio stuttering when going in and out of full screen view in a given app such as PowerPoint.”
Comment from 23 Jan 2026 in “Bugs Apple Loves” “I used PowerPoint via the browser and found this level of data loss is a regular occurrence.”
Comment from 31 Aug 2026 in “Student teacher arrested for private Snapchat message” “I've had both Libreoffice and PowerPoint break large sets of slides in weird ways.”
Comment from 23 Aug 2026 in “What's in a PowerPoint File?” Free rivals and AI make it obsolete
“I only create PowerPoint presentations a few times a year for work, which could be easily replaced with PowerPoint online or Google Slides”
Comment from 1 Sep 2026 in “The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice” “PowerPoint is the poster child for the class of applications that AI totally obsoletes”
Comment from 16 Apr 2026 in “ChatGPT for Excel” “we couldn't compete against a product that was basically being given away for free”
Comment from 23 Aug 2026 in “What's in a PowerPoint File?” Poor interop with other formats
“have been carefully and purposefully designed to be difficult to interop with other software.”
Comment from 18 Sep 2026 in “I hate you Microsoft” “the suggested replacement is PowerPoint, despite it being unable to natively open .pub files”
Comment from 8 Dec 2025 in “Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices” Confusing ribbon and template system
“the template system is a horror show”
Comment from 23 Aug 2026 in “What's in a PowerPoint File?” “where all of the stupid fucking buttons are in the stupid fucking ribbon bullshit they made”
Comment from 26 Sep 2026 in “What even is an OS now?”
Other presentation tools people recommend
The four most recommended other presentation tools, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bento HTML presentation tool | 68 | 11 | 86% | 5 | — | Approved |
| Microsoft PowerPointThis page | 42 | 55 | 43% | 11 | — | — |
| Apple Keynote | 27 | 25 | 52% | 10 | — | — |
| reveal.js | 11 | 3 | 79% | 7 | — | Approved |
| Immersa | 8 | 1 | 89% | 1 | — | — |
What people said
40 of the 101 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“PowerPoint itself has always supported a lot of powerful options like Presenter View”
“Word, PowerPoint, Keynote, paid software, etc. all used to actually work.”
“a presentable “live” demo that doesn’t run afoul of issues presenting demo sites to non-techies”
“using powerpoint related functions on a tablet is a problem solved in 2014”
“Well-behaved apps like PowerPoint that only take over the AirPlay session when prompted by the user”
“If PowerPoint is sufficient, it (mostly) works on Linux now”
“where all of the stupid fucking buttons are in the stupid fucking ribbon bullshit they made”
“have been carefully and purposefully designed to be difficult to interop with other software.”
“I only create PowerPoint presentations a few times a year for work, which could be easily replaced with PowerPoint online or Google Slides”
“I used PowerPoint via the browser and found this level of data loss is a regular occurrence.”
“I've had both Libreoffice and PowerPoint break large sets of slides in weird ways.”
“we couldn't compete against a product that was basically being given away for free”
“the template system is a horror show”
“copy-and-paste those into a PPTX file created by PowerPoint to make sure there were no weird things going on with the file”
“they can still use their files and templates they made last year even if Microsoft doubles the price of Powerpoint”
“Pretty neat, but hurt my soul to have all my classmates do that”
“Powerpoint is on the other extreme, so every formula is painful and you use as few as possible.”
“Word, Excel, and PowerPoint were all released for the Macintosh before Windows.”
“building a slide deck is a critical part of public speaking and presenting and helps kids out a lot”
“PowerPoint is the poster child for the class of applications that AI totally obsoletes”
“Or you could just talk to powerpoint, which creates a self contained pptx, which also plays anywhere.”
“I've never had any issue using the web version of the suite ever since it came out”
“PowerPoint is the best tool to prepare research presentations”
“I especially enjoy when one person is presenting slides, an executive makes a suggestion”
“You can still pay Microsoft money to get a desktop copy of Powerpoint, which will use your system fonts”
“we ended up making them in powerpoint and using the Google Docs compatibility mode with pptx”
“Both powerpoint and excel are well ahead of the competition.”
“Bluetooth audio stuttering when going in and out of full screen view in a given app such as PowerPoint.”
“Excel, Powerpoint, Word .... all fine”
“surprisingly it has good svg/obj support, with some creativity you can do wonders”
“I used it once for a fancy presentation and it worked fine”
“can create reasonable presentations using Powerpoint or equivalent”
“Powerpoint allows you all kinds of benefits like animations or transitions”
“in PowerPoint they can put things all over the place”
“Powerpoint… jain. It's cool, but Miro and Figma eat that cake nowadays.”
“PowerPoint is probably the replacement because it doesn't restrict where things can be placed”
“Multiplayer PowerPoint is the single largest advance in the business world since the spreadsheet.”
“the suggested replacement is PowerPoint, despite it being unable to natively open .pub files”
“Word and PowerPoint are also very solid.”
“I could make 4 lectures notes in PowerPoint, and they were better”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.