Before there were presentations, there were conversations, which were a little like presentations but used fewer bullet points, and no one had to dim the lights. A woman we can call Sarah Wyndham, a defense-industry consultant living in Alexandria, Virginia, recently began to feel that her two daughters weren’t listening when she asked them to clean their bedrooms and do their chores. So, one morning, she sat down at her computer, opened Microsoft’s PowerPoint program, and typed:

**{: .break one} ** FAMILY MATTERS An approach for positive change to the Wyndham family team **

On a new page, she wrote:

***{: .break one} ** **·**Lack of organization leads to confusion and frustration among all family members. **·**Disorganization is detrimental to grades and to your social life. **·*Disorganization leads to inefficiencies that impact the entire family. **

Instead of pleading for domestic harmony, Sarah Wyndham was pitching for it. Soon she had eighteen pages of large type, supplemented by a color photograph of a generic happy family riding bicycles, and, on the final page, a drawing of a key—the key to success. The briefing was given only once, last fall. The experience was so upsetting to her children that the threat of a second showing was enough to make one of the Wyndham girls burst into tears.

PowerPoint, which can be found on two hundred and fifty million computers around the world, is software you impose on other people. It allows you to arrange text and graphics in a series of pages, which you can project, slide by slide, from a laptop computer onto a screen, or print as a booklet (as Sarah Wyndham did). The usual metaphor for everyday software is the tool, but that doesn’t seem to be right here. PowerPoint is more like a suit of clothes, or a car, or plastic surgery. You take it out with you. You are judged by it—you insist on being judged by it. It is by definition a social instrument, turning middle managers into bullet-point dandies.

But PowerPoint also has a private, interior influence. It edits ideas. It is, almost surreptitiously, a business manual as well as a business suit, with an opinion—an oddly pedantic, prescriptive opinion—about the way we should think. It helps you make a case, but it also makes its own case: about how to organize information, how much information to organize, how to look at the world. One feature of this is the AutoContent Wizard, which supplies templates—“Managing Organizational Change” or “Communicating Bad News,” say—that are so close to finished presentations you barely need to do more than add your company logo. The “Motivating a Team” template, for example, includes a slide headed “Conduct a Creative Thinking Session”:

***{: .break one} ** **·*Ask: In what ways can we. . . ? —Assess the situation. Get the facts. —Generate possible solutions with green light, nonjudgmental thinking. —Select the best solution. **

The final injunction is “Have an inspirational close.”

It’s easy to avoid these extreme templates—many people do—as well as embellishments like clip art, animations, and sound effects. But it’s hard to shake off AutoContent’s spirit: even the most easygoing PowerPoint template insists on a heading followed by bullet points, so that the user is shepherded toward a staccato, summarizing frame of mind, of the kind parodied, for example, in a PowerPoint Gettysburg Address posted on the Internet: “Dedicate portion of field—fitting!”

Because PowerPoint can be an impressive antidote to fear—converting public-speaking dread into moviemaking pleasure—there seems to be no great impulse to fight this influence, as you might fight the unrelenting animated paperclip in Microsoft Word. Rather, PowerPoint’s restraints seem to be soothing—so much so that where Microsoft has not written rules, businesses write them for themselves. A leading U.S. computer manufacturer has distributed guidelines to its employees about PowerPoint presentations, insisting on something it calls the “Rule of Seven”: “Seven (7) bullets or lines per page, seven (7) words per line.”

Today, after Microsoft’s decade of dizzying growth, there are great tracts of corporate America where to appear at a meeting without PowerPoint would be unwelcome and vaguely pretentious, like wearing no shoes. In darkened rooms at industrial plants and ad agencies, at sales pitches and conferences, this is how people are communicating: no paragraphs, no pronouns—the world condensed into a few upbeat slides, with seven or so words on a line, seven or so lines on a slide. And now it’s happening during sermons and university lectures and family arguments, too. A New Jersey PowerPoint user recently wrote in an online discussion, “Last week I caught myself planning out (in my head) the slides I would need to explain to my wife why we couldn’t afford a vacation this year.” Somehow, a piece of software designed, fifteen years ago, to meet a simple business need has become a way of organizing thought at kindergarten show-and-tells. “Oh, Lord,” one of the early developers said to me. “What have we done?”

Forty years ago, a workplace meeting was a discussion with your immediate colleagues. Engineers would meet with other engineers and talk in the language of engineering. A manager might make an appearance—acting as an interpreter, a bridge to the rest of the company—but no one from the marketing or production or sales department would be there. Somebody might have gone to the trouble of cranking out mimeographs—that would be the person with purple fingers.

But the structure of American industry changed in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Clifford Nass, who teaches in the Department of Communication at Stanford, says, “Companies weren’t discovering things in the laboratory and then trying to convince consumers to buy them. They were discovering—or creating—consumer demand, figuring out what they can convince consumers they need, then going to the laboratory and saying, ‘Build this!’ People were saying, ‘We can create demand. Even if demand doesn’t exist, we know how to market this.’ SpaghettiOs is the great example. The guy came up with the jingle first: ‘The neat round spaghetti you can eat with a spoon.’ And he said, ‘Hey! Make spaghetti in the shape of small circles!’ ”

As Jerry Porras, a professor of organizational behavior and change at Stanford Graduate School of Business, says, “When technologists no longer just drove the product out but the customer sucked it out, then you had to know what the customer wanted, and that meant a lot more interaction inside the company.” There are new conversations: Can we make this? How do we sell this if we make it? Can we do it in blue?

America began to go to more meetings. By the early nineteen-eighties, when the story of PowerPoint starts, employees had to find ways to talk to colleagues from other departments, colleagues who spoke a different language, brought together by SpaghettiOs and by the simple fact that technology was generating more information. There was more to know and, as the notion of a job for life eroded, more reason to know it.

In this environment, visual aids were bound to thrive. In 1975, fifty thousand overhead projectors were sold in America. By 1985, that figure had increased to more than a hundred and twenty thousand. Overheads, which were developed in the mid-forties for use by the police, and were then widely used in bowling alleys and schools, did not fully enter business life until the mid-seventies, when a transparency film that could survive the heat of a photocopier became available. Now anything on a sheet of paper could be transferred to an overhead slide. Overheads were cheaper than the popular alternative, the 35-mm. slide (which needed graphics professionals), and they were easier to use. But they restricted you to your typewriter’s font—rather, your secretary’s typewriter’s font—or your skill with Letraset and a felt-tipped pen. A businessman couldn’t generate a handsome, professional-looking font in his own office.