For some time, the U.S. military has been drowning in PowerPoint presentations that make their work more difficult, not less, and lately they've been struggling to find a way out. Over at Wired, TAP contributor Spencer Ackerman tells us that Microsoft is working with the military (free of charge) to try to help them escape from the hell the company's products have created:
Like all technologies, PowerPoint can be used for good or ill -- to clarify and enlighten, or to fog the mind and dull the spirit. Given the amount of harm it seems to have caused in our armed forces, it's good to see the company stepping up and giving the men and women in uniform a hand.
The basic idea behind [Microsoft manager Dave] Karle's Method is to introduce "simplicity, cleanliness and a very refined and simple tool set" to plan a presentation. He's spent weeks with the Army compiling over 11,000 commonly used graphics into a database to spare officers the agony of searching for the right illustration. And — gasp — sometimes a presentation doesn’t have to use PowerPoint at all.PowerPoint gets a lot of hate, for some very good reasons. But a lot of it has its roots in the fact that for a long time, Microsoft seemed to have a commitment to making their office products produce the ugliest outputs possible. This was true of PowerPoint, and other programs as well -- the default charts in past versions of Excel are just painful on the eyes. The latest version is a significant improvement, but the company's design sensibility, even at its best, seems to be, "Nearly as nice as what Apple gave you three years ago." That matters, of course, because of Microsoft's ubiquity. No one is going to proposes that the entire military switch over to Apples because Keynote is better than PowerPoint, so PowerPoint it is. On the other hand, Microsoft doesn't force officers or military contractors to produce abominations like this legendary slide:"Use Word sometimes instead of PowerPoint. Use a whiteboard sometimes," Karle says. "It's all about fixing the tool behind the tool." He pauses. "I love that phrase."
It's not exactly a revolutionary concept. But military headquarters staff take to PowerPoint exactly like Pookie takes to the crack pipe in New Jack City — they hate it, even as they make themselves entirely dependent on it. One of Gen. David Petraeus' stock jokes is that PowerPoint is every general’s First Amendment right.
Like all technologies, PowerPoint can be used for good or ill -- to clarify and enlighten, or to fog the mind and dull the spirit. Given the amount of harm it seems to have caused in our armed forces, it's good to see the company stepping up and giving the men and women in uniform a hand. 
