Nancy Duarte and her firm Duarte Design have just released Slidedocs, their latest presentation book.

Continuing their trend of releasing books for free and in multimedia formats (see resonate), this latest is available for free download at their site in PowerPoint format. Though it seems odd to release a book as a PowerPoint file, in this case it is entirely appropriate as the entire focus of the book is creating print documents using PowerPoint, something Nancy calls "Slidedocs."

Practical Business Solutions

I have known that Slidedocs has been in the works for a while, and I'm excited for its release as it addresses an uncomfortable truth about corporate environments that often goes unaddressed by many presentation experts: PowerPoint is used far more than just as a tool to create formal on-screen slideshows. I'm not talking about the amateur poster designs at the water cooler announcing a canned food drive (although that's certainly a valid use), but rather high-stakes reports, memos, strategy documents, proposals and even white papers—things that once were the domain of Microsoft Word.

But Microsoft Word has become an entirely unusable program for most (myself included) if one wishes to inject any degree of design or complexity. This fact, coupled with the need for all types of communications to be more concise, produced more quickly and delivered more visually, has made PPT the default and de facto method of business communication creation.

We can debate whether this is a good thing or not, but it's a fact. Unfortunately, PPT's intrinsic design as "slideware," leads most to create stereotypical on-screen slides even when their work will never see a projector or large LCD screen. (Microsoft's default pages don't help, pushing its users to make 44pt headers and 32pt body copy).

The trend toward using PPT to create print documents was something I started seeing years ago, and instead of fighting it, I have long advocated using PPT in 3 distinct formats: