From Lucy Kellaway’s Financial Times column (sub req’d) syndicated this morning by the Irish Times (with added links):

The Anti-PowerPoint Party has attempted to calculate the economic damage of gawping at all these slides and has concluded that Europe wastes €110 billion a year from people sitting through dull presentations.

I suspect the true figure is even worse, as this ignores the secondary effects. PowerPoint must be the least enjoyable way of wasting time there is; a heavy slideshow can leave one feeling grumpy and passive and in no frame of mind for proper work. …

The Anti-PowerPoint Party is hoping to fight PowerPoint through peaceful means; it wants lots of journalists to write articles just like this one. Even if lots do, I hold out little hope of success. The seminal, devastating article on the subject, “PowerPoint is Evil”, was written by Edward Tufte in 2003 and published in Wired. And what has happened since then? Nothing, except that PowerPoint has gone on getting bigger.