There's no single "style of PowerPoint". People use it for various, different, things, and if you look at a deck made for one purpose through the lens of another, it'll look atrociously bad.<p>You can use PowerPoint (or Google Slides, etc) to make:<p>* Make visuals for your talk (in person, or over zoom); your talk is the main thing, and the backing visuals are there to focus people on what you're saying. Those kinds of slides often have a single sentence, image, chart, or code block. Importantly, those slides carry no meaning/story by themselves - you can't look at that deck without the talk itself.<p>* Handouts, or material to send over email, etc., in which the slides themselves are a thing (you might not be there to talk about them, or you can expand some of it as a follow-up). Slides are tightly packed with information, which needs to be carefully organized. They're usually bottom-line up-front (google BLUF), with on-slide info organized in pyramid fashion (google MBB slide structure).<p>(Edit to add: people often want to reuse the same slide deck for both uses, compromise on it, and end up with the worst combination. Nobody wants to do things twice over).<p>Diametrically apart, optimized for different things; if you're skilled at making those, can be super-useful. Trouble is, it's a <i>skill</i> that very few people are tought how to do. We expect people to be able to create and deliver a presentation without teaching them how to do it.<p>So what most non-experts end up doing, is what's in the linked book excerpt:<p>* pick a template you like<p>* add a bunch of bullet points where each bullet point is a paragraph of text<p>* fumble about with creating a chart that's only obvious to you (visualisation is a different skill in itself!)<p>* read the slides, slowly, while having your backs turned to the audience<p>Yeah, that's torture.<p>But it's not caused by powerpoint, same like spam is not caused by email. It's not because slides are inherently a worse format than articles or books (different, yes, and not for the same thing). It's just that people legit <i>don't know better</i>.