In the pre-PowerPoint era it was more common for people to actually prepare a talk rather than hide behind hastily-created slides that usually serve more as prompts for the speaker than visual enhancements to the content.
It is certainly possible to give bad presentations without PowerPoint, and good presentations with it, but most people only learn bad habits.
PowerPoint PRO TIP: The "b" key will bring up a black screen, and the "w" key will bring up a white screen, so people can look at your actual face when you are talking to them.
Banning Power Point because there are so many mediocre Power Points out there is like banning email because there are so many poorly written emails. Power Point provides unprecedented access to presentation tools as part of the "computer on every desk and in every home" revolution. A presentation no longer requires a draftsman and special print media. People can do it themselves. Even those for whom visual communication and on stage presentations are not core competencies. Most presentations aren't very good. They don't need to be. They just need to be good enough.
My Tip from making architectural presentations: Place yourself on the audience side of the fourth wall and point to your images as you tell your story. If it's about you and not the content, you're already on the wrong track because it's about you and not the audience.
Today, I don't need an atlas of Georgia Counties. I've got Wikipedia and the US Census Bureau and free long distance on my cell-phone plan and minutes that go unused every month. If I have a question about Ubuntu, I don't need a manual. There's StackExchange and Google. There are lots of lightweight channels.
Don't get me wrong, I love books and deep knowledge. But the six months that it takes to produce, publish, and disseminate a tome doesn't offer slam dunk ROI. The agilists have a point.
The problem with PowerPoint is that it incentivizes laziness and promotes pitch-culture to the detriment of quality in-depth discussion.
As I wrote in another post, how I would drive getting off of the pitch-train is through internal blogs, wikis, and possibly forums. The way things are today you tend to have 2 main tools in use: the pitch and then reactionary response (the email thread, bug trail, backlog, what-have-you). That's very limiting, myopic, and reactionary. It makes it difficult to have meaningful discussions at a meaty level of detail on things (designs, architectures, directions, etc.) Those things tend to happen in email threads which get unwieldy rather quickly.
You certainly don't need to have a report/document/memo/manifesto about every little thing. But when you need to have a discussion about, say, the direction of your whole product stack, major engineering changes, that sort of thing, it hurts when what should be a conversation at a level of an RFC is reduced to a pitch-deck that people then either thumbs up or thumbs down.
I guess we'll just have to agree to agree.
I can dump 7,000 words into powerpoint, chose a terrible font and terrible colours, fill it with weird clip art and transitions, and then bore and confuse my audience.
I like the idea of powerpoint. But there are far too many examples of suboptimal powerpoint presentations.
Perhaps there should be a gallery of good presentations (this probanly exists) which have the slides but also a video of the actual presentation, so people can compare the sparse slides and detailed talk.
Drawing a box with text in it will take me maybe ten time longer in PP compared to a transparency. Admittedly the lines will be straight, and the text more readable (assuming I choose a reasonable font size), but its so time consuming in comparison.
Data representation should properly be at least two variables plotted against one another, neither of which is time.