Using Markdown for automatized and versioned knowledge management and generating Powerpoint

Using Markdown for automatized and versioned knowledge management and generating Powerpoint

[Anssi Porttikivi]

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I work as a technical information secuity trainer (mostly) at KPMG Finland. 
We are very much a Powerpoint centric organization. I have maybe ~5000 
unique pages of training materials that we have been produced during ~20 
years. Updating, modularization, collaboration and versioning is a pain. 
Counting all the unmanaged copies and versions, we probably have ~1000 
Powerpoint files with 50 000 slides.

I recently tried, as a proof-of-concept, preparing a course with Markdown 
-> Pandoc -> Powerpoint, and I am pretty happy. An unintended nice surprise 
was how easy it is to change Office themes with the output. The company 
(and different departments) want to change the slide deck themes every now 
and then, and customers might want to use their own themes on per-customer 
company tailored courses. 

My pipe dream is to start keeping all training material, including binary 
lab resource in Git, and building a perfect hierarchy of includes to easily 
produce different trainings from the same base material, which would be 
always updating. So that when sildes about, say, "Hardening TLS" would be 
updated, they would update to 10 different courses automatically. 

Next dream is to automatically produce tenders, CVs and what nots from the 
business databases? Write scripts that combine some Markdown templates with 
some ASCII reports and convert all to fancy marketing brochures? 

I also dream of adding Git versionable and scriptable graphs with dot and 
Graphviz.

Has anybody ever had similar dreams? ;-)

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Re: Using Markdown for automatized and versioned knowledge management and generating Powerpoint

[subrta-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w]

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For me it's also quite interesting to create several powerpoint training 
materials using markdown, versioning and powerpoint themes, creating not 
only the powerpoint presentations, but also the invitation mails and other 
formats from one source. I am quite new to pandoc, so if you find it 
interesting, we can exchange ideas and solutions.

Dne čtvrtek 8. února 2018 12:29:37 UTC+1 Anssi Porttikivi napsal(a):
>
> I work as a technical information secuity trainer (mostly) at KPMG 
> Finland. We are very much a Powerpoint centric organization. I have maybe 
> ~5000 unique pages of training materials that we have been produced during 
> ~20 years. Updating, modularization, collaboration and versioning is a 
> pain. Counting all the unmanaged copies and versions, we probably have 
> ~1000 Powerpoint files with 50 000 slides.
>
> I recently tried, as a proof-of-concept, preparing a course with Markdown 
> -> Pandoc -> Powerpoint, and I am pretty happy. An unintended nice surprise 
> was how easy it is to change Office themes with the output. The company 
> (and different departments) want to change the slide deck themes every now 
> and then, and customers might want to use their own themes on per-customer 
> company tailored courses. 
>
> My pipe dream is to start keeping all training material, including binary 
> lab resource in Git, and building a perfect hierarchy of includes to easily 
> produce different trainings from the same base material, which would be 
> always updating. So that when sildes about, say, "Hardening TLS" would be 
> updated, they would update to 10 different courses automatically. 
>
> Next dream is to automatically produce tenders, CVs and what nots from the 
> business databases? Write scripts that combine some Markdown templates with 
> some ASCII reports and convert all to fancy marketing brochures? 
>
> I also dream of adding Git versionable and scriptable graphs with dot and 
> Graphviz.
>
> Has anybody ever had similar dreams? ;-)
>
>

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Re: Using Markdown for automatized and versioned knowledge management and generating Powerpoint

[John Noll]

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I had the same "pipe dream" as Anssi, and have achieved some of what he 
envisions for my university lectures, although on a much (two orders of 
magnitude) smaller scale, and using Beamer rather than PowerPoint.  You can 
see an example at jnoll.nfshost.com/cd4101-fall-18.

The key for me is the liberal use of PP, the "Generic preprocessor (with 
pandoc in mind)" (https://github.com/CDSoft/pp).  This allows me to specify 
details that change frequently (such as term or course number) without 
touching the content.  Beamer themes allow customization, say for different 
universities or clients; but I think this would be possible with PowerPoint 
too.  It all gets archived in Git, athough I haven't figured out a good way 
to separate the content from the infrastructure, so I'd be interested in 
how others have solved this.

We also use Pandoc to generate reports for our industry partners with whom 
we collaborate on research projects.  This is extremely useful as it not 
only allows us to maintain a consistent document format, but also enables 
automatic generation of reports from myriad data sources.  At present it's 
a bit of a Heath Robinson contraption, involving several custom Pandoc 
filters and other data manipulation programs, but it works really well for 
us, especially for reports that have lots of images.

My £0.02 worth.

-John Noll

On Thursday, October 18, 2018 at 6:54:44 PM UTC+1, sub...-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org wrote:
>
> For me it's also quite interesting to create several powerpoint training 
> materials using markdown, versioning and powerpoint themes, creating not 
> only the powerpoint presentations, but also the invitation mails and other 
> formats from one source. I am quite new to pandoc, so if you find it 
> interesting, we can exchange ideas and solutions.
>
> Dne čtvrtek 8. února 2018 12:29:37 UTC+1 Anssi Porttikivi napsal(a):
>>
>> I work as a technical information secuity trainer (mostly) at KPMG 
>> Finland. We are very much a Powerpoint centric organization. I have maybe 
>> ~5000 unique pages of training materials that we have been produced during 
>> ~20 years. Updating, modularization, collaboration and versioning is a 
>> pain. Counting all the unmanaged copies and versions, we probably have 
>> ~1000 Powerpoint files with 50 000 slides.
>>
>> I recently tried, as a proof-of-concept, preparing a course with Markdown 
>> -> Pandoc -> Powerpoint, and I am pretty happy. An unintended nice surprise 
>> was how easy it is to change Office themes with the output. The company 
>> (and different departments) want to change the slide deck themes every now 
>> and then, and customers might want to use their own themes on per-customer 
>> company tailored courses. 
>>
>> My pipe dream is to start keeping all training material, including binary 
>> lab resource in Git, and building a perfect hierarchy of includes to easily 
>> produce different trainings from the same base material, which would be 
>> always updating. So that when sildes about, say, "Hardening TLS" would be 
>> updated, they would update to 10 different courses automatically. 
>>
>> Next dream is to automatically produce tenders, CVs and what nots from 
>> the business databases? Write scripts that combine some Markdown templates 
>> with some ASCII reports and convert all to fancy marketing brochures? 
>>
>> I also dream of adding Git versionable and scriptable graphs with dot and 
>> Graphviz.
>>
>> Has anybody ever had similar dreams? ;-)
>>
>>

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