In his roundup of the Office 2.0 Conference, Jonathan Nolen makes a very, very good point about PowerPoint, and the design laziness it encourages. He says, “A good slide presentation should be useless without its speaker. If you email someone a slide deck by itself and expect that to work, your presentation sucks.” Hear, Hear. Jonathan’s point should be the first thing everyone learns about preparing presentations. I’ve been an avid reader of Garr Reynolds’ blog Presentation Zen for some time now, and Garr makes the same point in posts like Gates, Jobs & the Zen aesthetic, What is good PowerPoint design?, and Make your next presentation naked. I work very hard to make cleanly-designed presentations that use mostly images to stimulate thought, and encourage my audiences to be part of my presentations instead of passively hearing. My slides really would be useless without me there, and it’s nice to see that others recognize the importance of this idea.