An easier way to make fractals in PowerPoint

recently Matt Parker and Steve mold released a video showing how to make fractals using PowerPoint their method is very impressive and includes all the elements one might desire from an unconventional PowerPoint use case however I do have one complaint with the video which is that their technique unnecessarily requires as Matt Parker might say too much effort the approach they present cleverly utilizes PowerPoint insert object feature to embed a PowerPoint slide into itself embedding an entire presentation into itself is understandably not supported but PowerPoint inexplicably has no problem with creating a self-referential slide if the embedded copy of the slide is set to be a linked object the slide will update automatically each time the presentation is saved gradually building a fractal image Matt Parker and Steve mold successfully used PowerPoint to create a certain ski triangle but their method has a few limitations the presentation must be repeatedly saved to increase the depth of the fractal and with each save the save time increases exponentially since PowerPoint does not rasterize the vector-based images of the embedded slide in addition the embedded slides are always rectangular making some fractals difficult to create thus I'm afraid that professional fractal designers might not want to use this method and should instead use a different tool that is better suited for fractal creation PowerPoint slide zoom the relatively new slide zoom feature enables the creation of a summary slide that includes thumbnail images linking to the other slides in a presentation the presenter can navigate between slides with a zooming animation creating an original style of presentation that was definitely not inspired by competing products users can also drag a slide into the editor to create a zooming link to a specific slide the link updates in real time when the target slide is edited now in any reasonable presentation editor we might expect the menus to be arranged in a hierarchical structure free of cycles but PowerPoint isn't oh is reasonable and inserting a slide into itself leads to some interesting results using self-referential slides we can create many common fractal images the only limitation is the rectangular shape of the thumbnails which makes some more complicated fractals difficult or impossible to create thankfully Microsoft has anticipated this limitation and provides an option that seems to be specifically designed to allow for easy fractal creation [Music] when a thumbnail with a transparent background is clicked overlapping objects from the source slide are still displayed creating a perfect fractal zoom effect [Music] now while I would love to end this video with a clip of PowerPoint crashing under the load of infinite recursion it handles fractal rendering disappointingly efficiently the zoom thumbnails are stored as pixel-based images so each step of fractal generation takes the same amount of time regardless of the current complexity of the fractal however watching Matt Parker and Steve moulds video did give me an idea presentation is better than precision babies but there's an a they show how an embedded PowerPoint can be automatically launched as part of an animation sequence by embedding two presentations into each other they create an infinite presentation that gets increasingly nested with each click in theory such a presentation would continue indefinitely until the stack of powerpoints finally fills all the computers available memory but with a little modification we can do better than just theory [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Tom Wildenhain

Views: 162,205

Rating: 4.9866314 out of 5

Keywords: PowerPoint fractals

Id: O8l_awjgoMI

Length: 5min 19sec (319 seconds)

Published: Thu May 23 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/_selfishPersonReborn]

The fractals actually look fantastic, as well. /u/standupmaths?

[u/yitzilitt]

the dry humor here is on-point!

[u/Alphaetus_Prime]

How the fuck did he make the 3D one

[u/incomparability]

"Professional fractal designers might not want to use this method and should instead a different tool that is better suited for fractal creation..."

*shows picture of Adobe Illustrator*

"..PowerPoint Slide Zoom"
*zooms out*

​

That had me rolling

[u/dxdydz_dV]

I had been looking for something that I could use to turn images into fractals. Little did I know I had the right tool on my computer the whole time!

[u/XkF21WNJ]

Clearly we should begin judging programming languages on whether they are or are not PowerPoint™ complete.

[u/riyadhelalami]

Wow!!!!

[u/jagr2808]

All his videos are great. All the weird things he manages to do with power point.

[u/Revolutionalredstone]

MSPAINT is turing complete lol. Ofcoarse PP is!