I hate "PowerPoint", but what I really hate is bad meetings with the veneer of professionalism from having a presentation. I've wasted plenty of my life in such

I hate "PowerPoint", but what I really hate is bad meetings with the veneer of professionalism from having a presentation. I've wasted plenty of my life in such meetings (sometimes giving the presentation). Of course, there were boring meetings and boring slides before PowerPoint. I'm old enough to remember professors using those transparent slides. IMHO, things would go better if: * meetings had a clear objective, so you could tell what kind of information you might need to gather, share, or discuss to achieve it. * people focused on the story, not the document. I've found that most people seem to think that "writing presentation" == "preparing for the meeting", rather than being able to discuss the story without a presentation, and having it there to jog your memory and provide some visual aids. * we didn't ask presentations to work for both people in the meeting, and those who weren't there, but want to "see the presentation". These are totally different requirements to put on a document, and as a result, it's hard to do either one well. I've given a ton of "read slide title and bullet point" presentations (sorry, humanity), and I wouldn't say I'm a master or anything now, but I know I can do the whole presentation without slides, and I might blow through 5 or more slides in a minute, just using each as a beat to make a specific point visually, and then I might spend 5 minutes on one slide, digging into more complex information. The slide deck will not make sense to people who weren't there. ;-) But a 1-2 page set of notes can summarize it, which comes from preparing the story itself.