Working in a technical company, I enjoy the tools provided by my employer. Most of the tools are of the best class and highly contribute to productivity. Except Powerpoint. Whenever I need to use Powerpoint, I feel it is a pain:

• PPT is good for simple styling, but it makes it even harder if we want some advanced styles. (Microsoft is good at making simple things simpler, and hard things even harder).
• It is hard to embed code snippets and keep them in a consistent style.
• Terrible for version history. Even we can put the files under git, we cannot see the changes version by version.

It is not the 1990s anymore. We should have a better way to make presentations.

So long time ago, I started to use markdown to create presentations. Sometimes, I convert Markdown documents to PDF format. It works, but still not perfect. One drawback is, it is not so interactive.

Until one day, I saw Gavin creating a presentation with reveal.js. The slides looked beautiful. It’s lightweight. It is interactive. It is amazing! I started to use it and started to love it.

Here is my workflow to create a presentation now:

• I start to make it just a plain markdown document. We can use any text editor to do that. Many editors have great markdown support. The company paid ultimate edition of IntelliJ can also work;
• Use three dash surrounded with blank lines as slide separator;
• Run reveal-md to live preview the presentation; reveal-md is just a node package, it will convert a markdown document into a revealjs presentation.we can install it with the command npm i -g reveal-md;
• reveal-md will play the slides in a browser window; And we can start to present now;
• We can also convert the slides into a static site with reveal-md -s, and putting it to GitHub pages as well; We now have a better experience on making slides: the simple tools make us distraction-free, and we pay much less attention to the accidental things like styles and format. Our Markdown-based slides have much better maintainability! Bye-bye PPT! Happy working!