I struggle with PowerPoint. It’s an essential tool in my business but I’m never satisfied using it, which to be clear means that I’m never satisfied with the product I create with it as opposed to the application itself, which by my account is actually a pretty well designed app. I’ve tried Keynote, but my PowerPoint bias means I constantly find myself saying “why can’t this work like PowerPoint does” and pretty soon I figured out I was just better off sticking with PowerPoint.

It occurred to me after reading this post that the problem wasn’t PowerPoint but the lack of a better alternative to the bullet list slide as a communication model. A lot of people point to Dick Hardt’s SXIP presentation as the prototype non-bullet list presentation, but if you have tried to apply that method to other scenarios you realize it doesn’t scale very well.

What we really need is not a better presentation application but a better way of creating graphics and visuals for unstructured text data. A presentation design service category in Elance would also be a good addition. PPTExchange is a marketplace for people to share/sell their presentations but this is different from someone creating a presentation for you.