Engineering of PowerPoint

Very often, from the beginning of my career, I used PowerPoint and its relatives Word and Excel.

While the last two have a quite clear purpose, PowerPoint is the tool with the largest freedom. It is open to personal creativity and gives unexpected flexibility.

Surprisingly, in the engineering field, PowerPoint is one of the most widely used tool for communication both upwards to management and downwards towards team members. The surprise comes from the historical view of engineering as a quite boring and only numbers oriented activity. Flexibility has not always walked together with equations...

But perhaps here is the trick: the misunderstanding is that engineering is not static, but always moving. That's why only a tool where limits are given not even from the page borders is the valid support for idea communication. Presenting is of course not only matter of a good PowerPoint, but the latter is helping to concentrate messages.

Therefore the PowerPoint engineering is nowadays an almost full time job: knowing the tool is the first step. Bending it to the engineering needs the final target...