By Dennis D. McDonald

The Learning Circuits Blog’s  “big question” this month is, PowerPoint - What is Appropriate, When and Why?

Readers are asked to discuss the pros and cons of using PowerPoint on their blogs, to make comments, and to add to the growing bibliography of relevant articles. I’ve added my post titled Using a Blog for a “Web 2.0” Presentation instead of PowerPoint and the list of relevant articles continues to grow.

If you are a serious PowerPoint user,  you should check these items out. There are a lot of good tips and the discussions of “PowerPoint sins” are very insightful and helpful.

I admit I fall in the category of “I hate PowerPoint.” There have been many times in my consulting career when a final report had to be delivered as a PowerPoint file when it would more appropriately have been a word processing document. There’s something about the forced idea compression required by creation of a PowerPoint slide that leads to both creative thinking as well as to omission of key logical points.

That’s not PowerPoint’s fault, of course — it is just a tool, and tools can be used for good or ill.