Nancy Duarte in Harvard Business Review makes great points in Why I Write in PowerPoint such as a report, proposal, an article or an entire book.
- You can brainstorm with abandon because PP is so modular
- In your idea generation phase block out major sections and quickly see if you can generate enough ideas or image to support each or abandon before spending too much time crafting language
- You can put your references/citations/links at the bottom of each slide so you have ready access to your research
- Each slide can represent a sticky note or index card
- Easy to drag a slide to the end in case you need to revisit later or just delete
- You can arrange and rearrange to get the structure you are comfortable with
- You can easily switch between “Slide View” and “Slide Sorter” to get a sense of the whole and the parts versus in a Word document having to scroll through the whole document to move content around
- You can use color coding to signal varying levels of completion throughout the deck such as once a slide has a green dot that means it’s ready to be edited, yellow means needs a few more insights or examples, and red means needs major work
- You can rein in length by setting a master front size so you limit yourself to about 600 words for each slide thus when you extend beyond the bottom of the slide you know to tighten it up
- Provides easy collaboration by asking for feedback. You can print and post the slides on a wall for others to react to. As an example for the first part of a meeting reviewers read through the slides and add their feedback on the pages or sticky notes then the group discusses impressions and perspectives
- Enables others to work on different sections individually then they can be put back together just be careful about version control
- Google slides is another option for coauthoring because you can have multiple people working on slides at the same time
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