Death by PowerPoint

coined by Angela R. Garber · Small Business Computing, 2001
twenty‑five years of advice aimed at the presenter

Fewer bullets. Bigger type. No clip art. Tell a story. All of it good advice, all of it aimed at the human. None of it at the tool — and the tool is what decided a slide was a static rectangle you assemble by dragging boxes.

Look closer

This is not a slide.
It’s a web page.

sunholo.com/presentations/death-by-powerpoint/

drag to orbit

One self‑contained HTML file: markup, styles and script together, no build step and no licence. The Blender scene is an animated GLB rendered by the browser, and the audience can move around it. I didn’t write this page — an agent did, against rules I wrote in English. View source during the Q&A if you like.

The shift

The constraint that made PowerPoint sensible is gone

1987 – 2024

A human places every element by hand

So give them a canvas and some boxes. Given that constraint, PowerPoint is a good design. Everything people complain about follows from it.

Now

The author can write code

Once the thing assembling your deck writes code fluently, insisting it produce a proprietary binary is a strange thing to ask for.

This is the whole argument in one slide. Not “PowerPoint is bad” — it was a rational answer to a real constraint for thirty‑seven years. The constraint changed. The tool didn’t.

Thesis

Generate the medium,
not the file format.

Your audience never receives a .pptx. They receive a screen, and later a PDF and a dead link. Generate the screen directly and there is no conversion step left for anything to be lost in. Everything else in the next 45 minutes follows from that one move.

Death by PowerPoint

This is not a slide.It’s a web page.

The constraint that made PowerPoint sensible is gone

This is not a slide.
It’s a web page.