Part of me wants to agree with the article. It is easy to use PowerPoint to cover up the fact you don't have a clue what you are talking about by using lots of

Part of me wants to agree with the article. It is easy to use PowerPoint to cover up the fact you don't have a clue what you are talking about by using lots of flashy effects and "bling" that PowerPoint offers. The style I prefer is rather minimal and mainly uses PowerPoint as a "cheat sheet" to give me cues on what I want to tell my audience. This encourages me to focus on the audience rather than the computer running PowerPoint and speak more freely. An occasional image can help illustrate a point, but I tend to use them very sparingly. (The disadvantage is that someone simply looking at the slides afterwards won't have a clue what I said, but I can live with that.) The feedback I have received was very positive, although I never spoke to Marketing people who seem to be all about the pretty pictures and flashy transitions. My point, I guess, is that PowerPoint can be abused, badly, but I am not sure if it is fair to blame it for that. The world would not be that much worse off without PowerPoint, but people looking to distract from their cluelessness will find a way to do so anyway. A more realistic article might be titled "Use PowerPoint only when nothing else will do" or "Stop talking at your audience and start talking to them". EDIT: Fixed a typo