It's easy to forget that before PowerPoint: slides were napkin sketched by a manager, passed to a secretary to type up a detailed description, sent to a design bureau to piece together, proofs shipped to be examined/reviewed/quality-checked, then imaged to 35mm slides, and finally shipped back to the manager.

In comparison, ugly manager slides in PowerPoint really are a huge productivity boost.

Robert Gaskins' book Sweating Bullets about the early history of PowerPoint history is a fascinating read: http://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/sweating-bul...