But first and foremost, I use it for presentations. And after doing presentations with PowerPoint for many years, I’ve found that its sole purpose in presentations is to support the message of the presenter. If you keep that in mind while preparing a presentation (rather than going crazy with the transisitions and sounds), you’re more likely to be successful.

PowerPoint doesn’t demand you turn the Gettysburg address into a bullet list – that’s the author’s choice.

PowerPoint’s dreadful templates are an obvious target. Even so, unskilled designers (i.e. most people) manage to come up with far worse layouts if left to their own devices.

Wild animations are another irritation. But again, these are hidden from the novice and the default settings are sensible and discrete.

Tufte may dislike PowerPoint for its lack of resolution, but he makes that criticism of computer displays in general, not just .ppt.

Fair enough. But if you apply Tufte’s dictums, then PowerPoint’s colour and graphical control do allow you to present layers of inforation with a satisfying clarity.

In any case, the brevity (lack of resolution) PowerPoint demands is often good. It can force you to discard what is unnecessary.

We all seem to agree: the best presentations are illustrated with a handful of images and words that illuminate, rather than summarise, the speaker’s words. Detailed information should be included in the handouts (another PowerPoint feature).

So what would a piece of software that let you plan, chose and display images and words look like? Probably very much like PowerPoint.

In truth, this article is mostly a criticism of the poor judgement, verbosity and lack of skill of most content creators – of average authors.

But then, if everyone could communicate effortlessly, none of us would be in business.

For example, I am a physician, and in my daily life, there are tons of conferences. Many of them involve scientific data, specimen photographs, and procedural diagrams, all of which have much more meaning when presented in context. A good presentation, done with PowerPoint or whatever tool you choose (remember Harvard Graphics?), can do that — integrate key points of a much more verbose and detailed spoken presentation with the visual cues that provide another layer of data or understanding. The data is pretty complex — hence, me not agreeing with the diagram at the bottom of the article claiming that PowerPoint is only appropriate for low-complexity data — and well-understood when placed in context.

If PowerPoint is guilty of one thing, it’s of making it extremely easy for people to go from having no presentation skills to having no presentation skills and an annoying, animated, sound-enhanced presentation to go along with that. I like the notion that PowerPoint makes you become a better writer, but I think it goes beyond that — it gives you a better understanding of what you’re presenting and how best to summarize it visually while elaborating verbally.

In defining site content with clients, I have found powerpoint wireframes to be quicker to build and clients have no problem in opening the ppt files and reading them – not always easy with the more complex image programs used for wireframes.

Plus, a client can open your powerpoint documents and add comments directly on the wireframe. Ok, the disadvantage is that with powerpoint it is easy to move/add/delete content, that’s when it’s time to get worried…

I think that Tufte is fundamentally right that the bulleted list is a form which encourages sloppy thinking. It is with good reason that good writers across history have favored complete gramatical sentences. Being forced to shorten one’s prose can certainly be a Very Good Thing for one’s writing skills, but Powerpoint encourages writers to go well past this point.

The lessons of good writing apply no less to PowerPoint than to any other medium. If the message does not call for the use of a bulleted list, authors should not employ them. Likewise, if the message is better conveyed with lists than with prose, writers should use them.

And, please, call me Dan.

– Dan

1) When you insert pictures, insert *.PNGs. They’re more memory-efficient and allow you to use the alpha channel for transparency.

2) If you have any custom images in the background, put them in the master — not in every slide.

3) SAVE AS! You will be surprised to see how much space you will save if you open a deck and Save As something else. (It’s the only time PowerPoint takes out all the trash).

Better luck in future decks.

As far as distribution goes we’ve created a tool to convert a PPT into a Macromedia Flash SWF file for distributon on the web, CD-Rom, E-mail or via an Online presentation given real time to a number of people.

There are alternatives out there.