Introduction
Welcome to Grunt, the slide software for professionals.
Grunt is an add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint. That means that it adds functionality to PowerPoint that doesn't exist there, to begin with. PowerPoint is used by hundreds of millions of users worldwide – it's the de-facto industry standard. But if you're a professional, and you spend a lot of time in PowerPoint, you know that some tasks are tedious and time-consuming. It's difficult to ensure that your design is consistent and aligned properly and that all your texts and data are up to date. And, perhaps worst of all, is making changes to a design that's already looking nice, because you know that even the smallest of changes means another hour or two at the office. In fact, the prospect of spending all that time making a small change might well convince you to leave it as is, even if you know it's a mistake. We think that's a bad state of affairs. So we created Grunt.
A new approach to slides
Grunt grew out of our desire for a better way to make slides. We started our careers working at investment banks and consultancies, and have spent literally thousands of hours designing, updating, and maintaining slides. But because we were programmers to begin with, we knew there were faster, better, and easier ways to get the job done. To get there, we started with perhaps the most important idea in all of data processing and presentation, namely the separation of content and design.
Let your data lead the way
Grunt is built on the idea that your data means something. There's a structure to it, it conveys information, and that should inform how it is ordered and presented. That means that every design choice in Grunt is a rule. In essence, a rule is a really powerful form of conditional formatting. Moreover, rules can be applied to other rules, basically stacking the rules on top of each other. That way, by composing rules together, you can create extremely versatile designs that adjust to your data. It's much faster than using boxes and lines and moving them around in PowerPoint, and it's certainly faster to update. Let's dive in.