Not that there aren't reasons enough just in the way it gets used. Malicious PowerPoint files used to push remote access trojans
Since December 2021, a growing trend in phishing campaigns has emerged that uses malicious PowerPoint documents to distribute various types of malware, including remote access and information-stealing trojans.
And for no real reason, here is Life after Death by Powerpoint. It's 9 minutes of why PowerPoint should be banished from every business. Even if you only watch the first couple of minutes... If you have ever had to partake in a PP-driven meetings, you will understand.
As someone that has sat through plenty of multi-hour long PP presentations, sometimes in succession over a week, I laughed my ass off watching that. One thing he didn't mention was being handed a 3-ring binder with printed copies of each slide for each presentation. The pages were always double side printed with 3 slides per page. Sometimes the font was so small it would print as a bar because the printer couldn't resolve the print scale. I always left those stupid binders behind.
ReplyDeleteI use PP for training in the fire service. Easily seen colors, large text, no animations, photos, and imbedded videos. My text slides are simply topic points for my lecture, or class discussion starters, although I have done detailed slidesfor technical info. I just looked at my library and my longest presentation was 37 slides. My most recent one was only 11.
I've had Issues with PP since around 2002, when I first encountered it in person.
ReplyDeleteFirst, for a while it appears that all engineers would be required to submit weekly PP presentations, meaning that we'd have to spend time learning PP and then more time prettying up our weekly reports and putting them in useless form. Fortunately, saner heads prevailed, and we went back to sending in ordinary written reports. (One can have perfectly good fun with written reports. I spent a few weeks tracking down an arcane multi-stage power-management failure, and my reports had a vaguely Dashiell-Hammett-inspired quality. That got Management reading them.)
Second... an outside consulting firm had done a detailed thermal analysis of our product. Some months later, I needed to see the report. Turned out the only "report" we had in our possession was, yes, a PP file. Lots of happy-shiny presentation for Management, and a notable lack of data useful to Engineering.