"PowerPoint is the software we hate to love. It’s one of our most original and successful technologies, and yet it’s mostly written about in serious publications under headlines like 'Death By PowerPoint.'There are countless reasons this contempt for PowerPoint is wrong but a little stream of nerdiness that burst into life the other day reminded me of my favorite and least understood: it’s the perfect 'toy for thought.'

"Two characteristics of PowerPoint explain this:

First, it’s the perfect multimedia sparkfile. The prolific science writer and thinker Steven Johnson is fascinated by how ideas are created and sustained and one of his practices is keeping and regularly reviewing a Sparkfile: a long-running list of thoughts, ideas, and hunches. It lets you capture words, pictures, video, links. It’s how to build a slow hunch that goes beyond words. PowerPoint is to modern communications as a text file is to books. 

"Second, it’s a brilliant idea-processing tool. In her book Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made The Internet Claire L Evans interviews a number of hypertext pioneers and investigates how software can help us think. For instance, Alison Kidd a researcher at Hewlett-Packard, talks about the physical piles of paper we make as “spatial holding patterns” that enable us in “creating exploring and changing structures which can help inform us in novel ways.” Or Cathy Marshall of PARC and Microsoft Advanced Research builds hypertext systems 'meant to empower kinesthetic thinking, the process of moving things around and trying them out akin to "wiggling molecular models in space or moving a jigsaw puzzle piece into different orientations.’"

"Anyone who’s spent time building a presentation by noodling around in the Slide Sorter will recognize that PowerPoint excels at this. It lets you store and juxtapose language and image. You can play, wiggle, juggle. You can dive in and pull back, swoop down and sweep past. And then it lets you share them. In person. With other people who are in the same room as you. (For post-pandemic definitions of “‘room”’). At which point it also becomes about collective endeavor. It’s the modern successor to HyperCard, built for sociality, and networks of cooperation."

Author's Summary: Everything I Know About Life I Learned from PowerPoint