Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, on PowerPoint. Here are a few of my reactions (mine alone, not Microsoft's):
* Presenting an idea is one of the most subtle arts of the human experience. It draws on skills like storytelling, communication, and persuasion which are way outside the scope of any software application. The best typewriter in the world is going to let Ernest Hemingway's Great American Novel flow directly from his mind onto the paper, but it isn't going to make me even a tiny bit more capable of writing a great novel.
* A single PowerPoint presentation is often called into double duty, both as a visual aid to a live presentation, and a standalone document that serves as the summary of the presentation for those who couldn't attend. ("I can't make it this afternoon -- please send me the deck.") This requirement forces the PowerPoint presentation and spoken content to become 100% redundant with each other, yielding the meetings where people read verbatim off an overly dense PowerPoint slide. PowerPoint has features that try to address this problem, such as hidden slides that show up in the printed document but not the slide show, and narration recording so that you can distribute the audio along with the slides, but presenting from the "leave-behind deck" is still common.
* There's always a tension between giving the user full control, and making the experience as simple as possible. Also, the more structure you embed in an authoring application about what the output "should" look like, the more you encourage everyone towards a homogenous vision defined by the product designers. PowerPoint does make it easy to insert simple diagrams such as with SmartArt, but fundamentally the application is designed to let the user take full control of the content. I wouldn't want a text editor that didn't allow me to write a grammatically incorrect sentence. However, a suggestion that "the grammar in this sentence might be wrong" could be useful, if presented in a non-obtrusive way.
These are issues we think about every day in the PowerPoint team, and I appreciate reading the various viewpoints here.
The core problem is that PowerPoint is a tool that changes user behavior. Without PP a person sees their task as "how do I communicate my message to these people", with PP it's "how do I finish my slide deck". There are people who use PP to the end of much more effective communication, but those people are unicorns.
Almost universally, my experience with people is they only want to finish slides and spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about fonts and backgrounds and arrangements. When it comes time to present it's the usual awkward slide-reading and the slides only serve to distract the viewers from the messenger.
"Send me the deck" ends up being fairly useless as well because not enough context or content is actually in the slides. Sometimes you get a few bits of hyperlink gold or some single valuable piece of data.
In the end, I think PowerPoint is a powerful tool for effective communication that shouldn't be used in most circumstances (because in that "most" it makes communication worse). I appreciate the hard work and difficulty you must go through trying to design a tool to effect human behavior to promote good communications.
The slides mostly had code on, and some occasional light hearted stuff (but not distracting).
Without slides this would have been too fiddly for some presenters, e.g. messing around with a text editor or worse just explaining code with no visual.
However rarely was there a slide where the talker just read off it. I think there was 1 slide I witnessed where that happened.
I once read somewhere that there are decks for verbal presentation and decks to present summary information for offline review. Conflating the intended purpose causes issues and that's always stuck with me as good advice.
Personally, I like to use Powerpoint as talking points and just go with the flow for the remainder of the conversation.
Is there a reason why you rescale the font size when the user inputs too much text? Changing it so that you'd have to really dig deep in some menu in order to put 200 words on each slide seems like it would be a big improvement. Beamer and the various HTML5 backends to Pandoc all do this and I really like it.
I suspect that most casual users appreciate that feature. And for myself, as a "power user" - who usually builds multi-hundred page slide decks - I often construct drafts of my presentations that might include slides with a cut/paste of material from documentation or the Internet - to be processed later. So autosizing makes it possible for me to revise that raw material into slides later.
Sometimes, a quick presentation is in order. When that happens, I setup a very minimal, easy to view style, then blast the material in. Usually, this is for familiar audiences and it's a mix of technical and sales type material. People will be referring to it later, and it needs to be talked through.
So use one document, put it out there, do the review, and right there, add, edit, delete, until it's all sorted. Distribute, or take the end result into some other format.
As a person who has made a living with MS Office products throughout the B2B sales cycle, I am fundamentally grateful for the tools created. PowerPoint is extremely powerful. Unfortunately, the one thing it "needs" the ability to do - train people how to use it effectively - isn't really a core competency. Practically speaking, I don't think instruction on how to use PowerPoint is genuinely possible, insofar as different business and cultural applications will have varying approaches and implementations.
The only thing that bothers me about PowerPoint, on a personal/professional level, is that it is so easy to use. Any semi-literate person with an ojbective and enough time on their hands can realistically create a deck. In a lot of ways, I see PowerPoint and Garageband as similar in this regard - sure, the software can help "make" a presentation or song, but will it be any good for an audience?
Basically, I think your first point is spot-on, and should be used as a buffer from undue criticism. In my professional experience, I've seen far too many "experts" in their fields try to tell me, the "presentation expert" what to do, how to do it, and be stupidly stubborn in fighting the collaborative process. To put it another way, many professionals talk trash about a liberal arts degree (such as creative writing) or the pursuit of experience in live performance (such as drama or comedy in front of audiences) until they realize that the highest stakes business situations are simply concentrated, higher pressure versions of those types of performances. It takes quite a while for a professional to get to a point in their career whereby they might have this epiphany, and those who do "get it" rise to the top in competitve opportunities. They understand the art of presentation, and they embrace guidance and support from artists (wordsmiths, graphic designers, etc) to achieve their vision.
My thesis topic for a Masters in Education (Curriculum Design) focused on the balance of technological tools versus internal intellectual development. Somewhat akin to the hypothesis of "If I have this ubiquitious computer program that will correct my spelling / grammar for me, do I really need to know how to write well in the first place? No!" From what I found in research / studies, yes, that appears to be the trend.
PowerPoint unfortunately allows its users to fall into the same trap, insofar as people can fire up the program, get started, and plow through to their objective ("create a presentation") without the due diligence to plan, structure, and consider their audience's expectations and attention span. That's not the software's fault...well, maybe in some respects because it doesn't have the hard learning curve to keep it out of the hands of those who shouldn't be diddling with it (Garageband vs. Ableton Live is a reasonable comparison), but there's nothing inherently bad about PowerPoint. Nope, it's a good piece of kit. The idiots that use it on the other hand? Yeah, software can't fix them, nope, no way, no how...
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go back to deleting 17 extra Master Slides, adjusting page numbers so they all align, re-pasting graphics from Excel as Enhanced Metafiles instead of JPGs, fixing the header font size to be consistent, and wondering what kind of demon decided to change the font from Arial to Calibri in random places!
(Not really, but been there, done that, got the T-shirt)
I like the analogy of GarageBand vs. Ableton Live. As a mass-market application, PowerPoint has to be as easy to get started with as GarageBand, but support advanced customized features for power users, such as motion paths, custom shows, and of course the features that developers can add through the API.
Teaching users how to use PowerPoint is important, and something that we must continuously improve, but teaching users how to effectively communicate and idea is out of scope for us. That's a skill that takes a lifetime to master.
* Presenting an idea is one of the most subtle arts of the human experience. It draws on skills like storytelling, communication, and persuasion which are way outside the scope of any software application. The best typewriter in the world is going to let Ernest Hemingway's Great American Novel flow directly from his mind onto the paper, but it isn't going to make me even a tiny bit more capable of writing a great novel.
* A single PowerPoint presentation is often called into double duty, both as a visual aid to a live presentation, and a standalone document that serves as the summary of the presentation for those who couldn't attend. ("I can't make it this afternoon -- please send me the deck.") This requirement forces the PowerPoint presentation and spoken content to become 100% redundant with each other, yielding the meetings where people read verbatim off an overly dense PowerPoint slide. PowerPoint has features that try to address this problem, such as hidden slides that show up in the printed document but not the slide show, and narration recording so that you can distribute the audio along with the slides, but presenting from the "leave-behind deck" is still common.
* There's always a tension between giving the user full control, and making the experience as simple as possible. Also, the more structure you embed in an authoring application about what the output "should" look like, the more you encourage everyone towards a homogenous vision defined by the product designers. PowerPoint does make it easy to insert simple diagrams such as with SmartArt, but fundamentally the application is designed to let the user take full control of the content. I wouldn't want a text editor that didn't allow me to write a grammatically incorrect sentence. However, a suggestion that "the grammar in this sentence might be wrong" could be useful, if presented in a non-obtrusive way.
These are issues we think about every day in the PowerPoint team, and I appreciate reading the various viewpoints here.