PowerPoint decks for the upper tiers of an organization can take on a whole different character. I shit you not that it's common to pass them around in email as if they were a document format, even for information that is never intended or expected to be presented. As if they were PDFs or something. It's crazy.

[EDIT] There's also a kind of horrendous, illegible house style some places, that's expected to be how these documents look. The US military and any big businesses that work heavily with them are infamous for this. They routinely produce some comically terrible decks and graphics. I wouldn't be surprised if that weird, seemingly-intentionally-hard-to-read style is also present in at least some parts of NASA, especially up at the administration level.

At a previous job, my favorite to see were the ones with 3 slides. It was like nobody could communicate information without powerpoint.

  1. Title slide with company logo
  2. Content slide with 2 or 3 bullet points
  3. Closing/thank you slide with contact info

> I wouldn't be surprised if that weird, seemingly-intentionally-hard-to-read style is also present in at least some parts of NASA, especially up at the administration level.

Unfortunately I direct experience and it's definitely present in some parts of NASA. We have increasingly been doing away with presentations when reporting updates up the chain. Just shoehorn your work into a single poorly designed slide and lob it over the fence. Your project manager rolls up your slide with everyone else's and lobs that deck over the fence to the program management. Hey, at least it's one fewer meeting.

I worked as a games producer for a major video game company 20 years ago and had bimonthly project green light meetings. Every 60 days, I had to produce a 80-120 slide powerpoint with info from development, marketing, PR, sales, finance, etc using their awful house layout. Then print these massive tomes for the executives. They would ignore everything else, and the presentation, jump straight to the finance info at the back of the deck and discuss the EBITDA for 10 minutes and then end the meeting.

@DefenseCharts has a great collection of these for anyone interested.

https://nitter.net/DefenseCharts

The defense industry really is the GOAT when it comes to slide decks.

Nothing gets the creative juices flowing like sitting through an 8 hour presentation of a deck with 200 slides, which are really just 10 different slide decks from 10 different departments stitched together, mostly containing quotes copied from actual design documents and pasted into bullet lists

It's not unusual for the management/BOD decks I work on to be 30 slides + 100 slides of appendix material. Everything in the 30 slides is heavily footnoted and supplemental/support information is in the appendix. It's kind of bonkers but pretty much standard practice at certain sized companies.

Been there, and unfortunately had to participate in that. Execs sometimes have a hard time conveying information, so PPT to the rescue! I want to blame management schools for their over-reliance on PPT, but in all honestly, it's hard to teach people to be good communicators.

> It's not the tool, it's the presenter

That's true, but it's also how much time the presenter had to put the presentation together. Was he already 6 weeks behind on a dozen (meaningless) deadlines when he found out he had to give a presentation tomorrow morning at 8 AM?

Assuming we are talking about boring slides with just a few bullet points, then 99% of work is actually creating the (text of the) presentation. Creating boring slides can be done in a few minutes.

Most time when I see a wrong and overful slide deck, people don't actually have any idea what they want to say. They just dumped some information in the slides that might be handy.