Presentation software

There are a few very good reasons why you should abandon Microsoft products in general, and Powerpoint is a great example of a product that the *vast majority* of people use, even though it isn't that great.

What's wrong with powerpoint?

There are several challenges with working with powerpoint as presentation software, including:

  • It is opaque, not searchable; a binary file, not plain text

  • It is difficult and time consuming to write and edit

  • It is a closed-source, proprietay software, that requires Powerpoint application to work

  • It is heavy and slow to do anything

    • Like almost everyone, I used powerpoint for years for every presentation I needed to do; I didn't even think about it. Everyone else used it, so I used it too. It is the default preentation software, but that doesn't mean it is the *gold standard* of presentation software. We all got used to Powerpoint's particular quirks, but these become a real impediment to efficient workflow for someone who does a *lot* of presentations, or where you want more control over workflow, efficiency, speed, etc.

    The first major issue is that Powerpoint is not searchable. It is an opaque binary file format. Say I have inherited a class, and the previous lecturer has helpfully provided the slides the used last year: great! Maybe I want a different focus, different images, video, etc. But now I have weeks of presentations to search through, and try to edit. What if I know that a text block I need is somewhere in the International Relations research methodology class I taught last year, and quickly need to copy and edit it for a different use case? I would need to look one by one, manually opening Powerpoint and searching through each slide presentation until I found the text or image I wanted to use. That is a real pain. What if I wanted to copy the text in a presentation, and rework it as an explanatory document? I would need to copy/paste the text from every slide individually. There would be problems with headers and body, text boxes, images getting in the way. I would end up with a mess.

    Powerpoint is Microsoft proprietary software. That means that however common Powerpoint application is, it is not truly portable. You cannot open and use it with another app; at some point backwards and forwards compatibility is not complete. An old style .ppt is different to a .pptx. At some point in the future .pptx will also be discontinued. When you use a proprietary file format you are chaining yourself, now and in the future, to that toolchain. Recently Microsoft made some important changes to the Office suite, including making the Microsoft365 the standard, and slowly depracating the offline, desktop version Office, which has been the standard since the 90's. The new Microsoft365 comes with Copilot, their LLM, inbuilt. Apart from introducing dependency and performance issues, many people do not want an inbuilt AI in their office suite software. There are security questions with an AI that is able to view your files and send telemetry to Microsoft servers, even if they say your work is safe. Should you take that risk if you are interviewing subjects who must remain confidential, or where there is some political or personal risk due to the nature of the research?