A Few Reason I Think PowerPoint is Awesome

I've always been quite a fan of Powerpoint. Now I'll be quick to point out that I'm not saying I love all the lectures and presentations I've been given with PointPoint. However I think PowerPoint is just wonderful for making diagrams and posters. In the last three days I've used Powerpoint to

• make a sign indicating that a bathroom should not be used
• make a floorplan showing where to position tables for a party
• show the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of Raytheon for a class report.

And the remarkable thing is it

was fun making all these diagrams. I was actually looking forward to doing some of this work in Powerpoint. And it was easy!

What I think make PowerPoint such an enjoyable and easy to useprogram to use is its user interface. There's much to say here, but I'll focus on a couple features I particularly like:

Rotation

Whether it's arrows or a table or an image I could not imagine rotating images to be any easier. Clicking on the item displays nodes around it. The nodes can be grabbed to resize, but there is also a green node that rotates the object. It's nearby (Fitt's Law) and if the snap-to-grid setting is enabled (the default) it's easy to get things exactly horizontal or vertical.

Grouping

Combined with copy-paste, the ability to group things together is very useful. It reminds me of object oriented program. I can combine a textbox and shape and make it a "table". Then I can create a new table (copy-paste), or change the size of the table and the textbox will change size automatically. All it takes is selecting multiple elements and then right clicking (again having this option be one of the few in the dropdown menu means it does not take long to get to it -- valuable given that clicking anywhere else would lose the focus on the items to be grouped).