Update: Silk has been discontinued.
Greetings, reporters, and welcome to spring. I want to go hang out outside, so let’s talk about a quick hack:
Making graphics with Google Slides. Yes, the online version of PowerPoint.
I came across this discovery pretty easily: I needed to make a simple flowchart for my conference session on scraping. I was flailing a bit, because all I needed was a simple graphic with some squares and arrows, and apparently I haven’t done that since I would draw pictures in Microsoft Paint. (Remember that?)
Turns out Google Slides has all the basic features you’d need for something like this: Shapes, Fill, Align, Group, Arrange. Even Animate. Making a graphic in Slides, screenshotting it, and publishing it elsewhere turned out to be the easiest solution.
Obviously this has some limitations. It’s not interactive, it doesn’t visualize data like Silk, and it’s certainly not as customizable as Adobe Illustrator.
But that’s the gist of a “hack”: I needed something done. I didn’t need or want to learn a new tool or install a new program. Sometimes all you need a shortcut.