Playing nice with Excel (and PowerPoint) is an underrated feature. The next step I see from business users is taking the formatted Excel table and pasting it in

Playing nice with Excel (and PowerPoint) is an underrated feature. The next step I see from business users is taking the formatted Excel table and pasting it into a PowerPoint slide. The hacker mindset often says the Microsoft Office suite is the wrong tool for the job, so we should use X tool and Y process instead. That may be true, but there's so much institutional inertia at established organizations that it's hard to completely abandon the Office suite. Anything that lets a technical user do something programmatically, but allows the output to be easily manipulated by a non-expert is invaluable. I've had success generating svg visuals and placing them in slides, which PPT treats as a "shape" (the Graphics Format ribbon appears), and business users like that they can modify the shapes (for example, change the color). Great Tables supports pdf export, but not svg. I just tested a pdf vector in the current version of PPT, and while it maintains the vector, PPT won't let me convert it to a shape (only the Picture Format ribbon is available). Great Tables doesn't seem to support svg export directly, so there needs to be an additional pdf -> svg conversion.