The other problem with Powerpoint is that it enables the some of the worst professional behavior in us individually and in groups. Some people don't like to write. Some people don't like to read. Or read mail-outs before a meeting. And some people like to hide in endless meetings to appear as if they are busy (working), while they are just busy in endless meetings not working.

Many if not most 8~20 slide presentations could be more succinctly (and index-ably / search-ably) provided to the audience in a two-three page memo with a chart or diagram or two. Even a short white-paper might be nice to articulate a case for present and future audiences.

But at my current company - I give "lunch seminars" with powerpoint slide support on a repeat-cycle (periodically - because we're growing - there are always people who haven't seen it yet), because (from what I can tell), (some? many? most?) people can't be tossed to read a 4~5-page written summary of the topic. (Huge waste of company resources to support some lame-o trucculance in my mind - but I could be wrong)

EDIT: Please allow me to ask a question of the HN crowd. To me, if it were my company (and I have had a few with varied success), if an employee can not (or will not) read and can not (or will not) write in a structured format, in an organized way, and be prepared for meetings, before the meeting starts, by having read all of the relevant material -- is it the company's obligation to spoon-feed them? Or should the company get tight and move those people out the "Next!" door?

> Please allow me to ask a question of the HN crowd. To me, if it were my company (and I have had a few with varied success), if an employee can not (or will not) read and can not (or will not) write in a structured format, in an organized way, and be prepared for meetings, before the meeting starts, by having read all of the relevant material -- is it the company's obligation to spoon-feed them? Or should the company get tight and move those people out the "Next!" door?

Up to you.

If you are running the company, you can set the expectation and punishment.

However, if I have read all the relevant material, what was the point of the meeting?

The problem is that meetings wind up serving multiple purposes, and you don't always know which one you are in before the meeting starts. There are meetings to hash out a difficult problem (rare, but very important). There are meetings to disseminate information and vision (common, and useless to a lot of people but required because you never know when you are the person who missed the relevant info). There are meetings to CYA (too common). There are meetings to solve things which cross management boundaries or allocate resources (somewhat less common, but important). Then there are simply political or show meetings by useless people (sadly too common).

In reality, the really big problem is that people don't feel able to slag a meeting because it looks like you are slagging the person in charge of the meeting. I can send back "Will Not Attend" to meeting requests and will get indignant responses of:

"What the hell do you mean you won't attend?"

"Fine, tell me what input from me that you are going to need."

"Ummmmmmmmmm."

"Exactly. When you can tell me what input I'm supposed to give other than consumption of oxygen, I'll attend."

Do you mean that graphic designers should bother themselves with CSS instead of dragging shapes? I must have misinterpreted what you said.

Also, I find the PDF format to be quite practical for real world use, just because it is easy to print them and then annotate them by hand in a meeting or while reading them.

The main reason for using PPT is a presentation during a meeting, not to put something out on the web. And you may prefer the feature set from Word or Excel over Google Docs for some tasks, where the resulting documents can easily be emailed or put on a shared drive. Also Office 365 offers online versions of Office, or you could upload to Google Docs.

IME, they are used for the kind of meeting that isn't really a meeting at all. Nothing is discussed, and some idea is "presented" to a Powerful Person by the Presenting Person, plus some other people who are there to spectate for no obvious reason. At the end of it, Powerful Person says they will think about it, and Presenting Person will send out a summary of the meeting in email.

Why not just send the email to begin with, with a full, coherent summary of the proposal, have Powerful Person email their approval or rejection, and skip the several person-days worth of meetings?

First, Presenting Person, like nearly all people, is borderline illiterate, hasn't written a report or essay since college, and probably simply couldn't do so coherently in any reasonable length of time. For them, PowerPoint is a crutch to avoid having to actually commit their proposal to writing. Instead, they put up some bullet points that are vaguely related and just talk about it.

Second, there is Powerful Person. They are again, like most people, borderline illiterate, and haven't read anything longer that a listicle since B-school, so they'd rather sit back and stroke their beard for 20 minutes than bother with possibly needing to look up a word they don't understand. More importantly, the presentation or "meeting" is an opportunity to display primate dominance. Essentially they are "holding court" to demonstrate to everyone that they are the ones in charge. The idea that Presenter Person may have stayed up late getting every slide pixel-perfect in preparation for this meeting only enhances this function.

Finally, there are the spectators. Powerful Person needs them there for the primate dominance function already discussed. The more people there are to witness Presenting Person prostrating themselves before Powerful Person, the greater utility the ceremony has in this regard. Luckily, all of these people are easily convinced to show up for the meeting, because it's a way to schedule a surreptitious break into a workday that has probably had all actual breaks like lunch breaks, coffee breaks, cigarette breaks, slowly eliminated over the course of years and decades.

In short, nobody can read, nobody can write, and showing up for meetings is easier than real work. Enter PowerPoint: the software package tool-using social primates reach for most when nominally attempting to make business decisions.

Sounds like the makings of a sitcom.

> The problem with Powerpoint is that it is 'not the web'.

But it is!

https://talkjs-my.sharepoint.com/:p:/g/personal/egbert_talkj...