Can your audience see it's PowerPoint?

At the beginning of a presenting class I usually show my design students various slides and ask if they can tell what tools were used to create them.

They can almost *always* tell the PPT slides, and often even the PPT version from the templates used.

On the other hand: even using InDesign you can produce visually poor stuff.

It is never the tool. It is always the eye! And the many, many poor slides we have seen over the years that we imitate for lack of better role models.

Good thing this is finally changing.

After a recent presentation I did, I had perhaps a dozen people ask me, "What WAS that software you used?"

"Just Powerpoint."

"Are you serious? Powerpoint can do that?"

So to paraphrase Anke, it's not the tool, but how you use it.

That's the question you want to get