Devoted to technical writing and technical writers

I'm just asking. I actually have no idea. Microsoft Press published Chris Atkinson's book Beyond Bullet Points, and even did a course on it (I was the Instructional Designer for that one). Bullet points and data-laden slides are often pointed to by presentation experts as poor tools in effective presentation delivery, yet not only do Microsoft employees continually use them, they praise them! At least, that's been my experience.

I recently worked on a Live Meeting presentation for a team at Microsoft's Global Markets and I tried to keep the slides as simple and visual as possible, yet the team planners hated it. One of them told me that most Microsoft folks are "experts" at using PowerPoint so I need to bring my design for their course up to their accustomed level of work!

For those of you that strive to make presentations more appealing to your audience, and increase their retention of your material after the presentation is over, check out this excellent blog post comparing Bill Gates style of presenting to Steve Jobs. As a disclaimer, Garr Reynolds, who wrote that post, is a former employee of Apple, and Kathy Sierra, who has also blogged about this topic recently, uses Apple's Keynote application and not Microsoft's PowerPoint.

Nevertheless, whether you're an Apple fan or a Microsoft fan (for the record, I'm a fan of both companies but for different reasons), it's my sincere hope that members of both camps can rise above corporate allegiances to embrace what's best for the reader, and all the evidence that I've read supports Atkinson's position.