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It's not clippy, but Microsoft has added "suggested styling" to Powerpoint, and I let it re-layout my pages, and the results are beautiful. It sees your page an

It's not clippy, but Microsoft has added "suggested styling" to Powerpoint, and I let it re-layout my pages, and the results are beautiful. It sees your page and suggests a layout, which you can choose to accept. It's explained badly here, but it works well: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-professional-slide-layouts-with-designer-53c77d7b-dc40-45c2-b684-81415eac0617 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-profession... I think there is room for a good "AI" companion that runs when you're in Word, or Powerpoint. (Maybe not Excel.)

MereInterest 4y ago
Microsoft has also added "suggested phrasing", which prioritizes concision even when it removes deliberately inserted uncertainty. In some cases, following its suggestions wouldn't even have resulted in coherent sentences. For a sentence of the form "Do $X, unless $VAR is true." had the recommend replacement "Do $X, unless $VAR.".
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  > For a sentence of the form "Do $X, unless $VAR is true." had the recommend replacement "Do $X, unless $VAR.". // Was your actual sentence "Do $activity, unless $condition is true." (with $activity as say 'print the annual report' and $condition as 'Steve has printed it')? I'm struggling to see how the result wasn't coherent. Something like "Do P&L, unless Wednesday" is terse, but not hard to parse; I must be missing something?
  - MereInterest 4y ago
    I tried to look back to find the exact example, but couldn't find anywhere that I had written it down. It was something where the $condition was a single word, referring to a boolean variable, but was not itself an adjective. By removing the "is true" clause, the clause was left without a verb, and without an antecedent.
nerdponx 4y ago
You know what feature I want? The ability to "upgrade" any text that matches some specific set of properties (eg. "Font size > 12, bold") and apply a particular style to it. People create all kinds of horrifying fucked up Word documents with DIY manual formatting, and cleaning it up can be a huge chore. People don't seem to realize that Word (and LibreOffice Writer) is actually a pretty good document processing and typesetting program, for when you want more features than Markdown/Adoc/rST but you don't need the meticulous precise control of *Tex. But you need to use features like footers, styles, cross-references, etc.

MereInterest 4y ago

Microsoft has also added "suggested phrasing", which prioritizes concision even when it removes deliberately inserted uncertainty. In some cases, following its suggestions wouldn't even have resulted in coherent sentences. For a sentence of the form "Do $X, unless $VAR is true." had the recommend replacement "Do $X, unless $VAR.".

pbhjpbhj 4y ago
> For a sentence of the form "Do $X, unless $VAR is true." had the recommend replacement "Do $X, unless $VAR.". // Was your actual sentence "Do $activity, unless $condition is true." (with $activity as say 'print the annual report' and $condition as 'Steve has printed it')? I'm struggling to see how the result wasn't coherent. Something like "Do P&L, unless Wednesday" is terse, but not hard to parse; I must be missing something?
- MereInterest 4y ago
  I tried to look back to find the exact example, but couldn't find anywhere that I had written it down. It was something where the $condition was a single word, referring to a boolean variable, but was not itself an adjective. By removing the "is true" clause, the clause was left without a verb, and without an antecedent.

nerdponx 4y ago

You know what feature I want? The ability to "upgrade" any text that matches some specific set of properties (eg. "Font size > 12, bold") and apply a particular style to it. People create all kinds of horrifying fucked up Word documents with DIY manual formatting, and cleaning it up can be a huge chore. People don't seem to realize that Word (and LibreOffice Writer) is actually a pretty good document processing and typesetting program, for when you want more features than Markdown/Adoc/rST but you don't need the meticulous precise control of *Tex. But you need to use features like footers, styles, cross-references, etc.