The X1 Blog

(Originally posted May 7, 2010)

Elizabeth Bumiller’s piece in the New York Times last week, “We Have Met the Enemy and He is PowerPoint”, was at one point mid-week the most read and emailed article on nytimes.com.  While the focus of the article was the U.S. military’s reliance on PowerPoint, response in the comments section and throughout the blogosphere quickly shifted to a more general discussion of its overall utility.  Suffice to say, Microsoft’s presentation application is so deeply embedded in corporate workflow and culture that any commentary generates a fair amount of reaction, both positive and negative.   Candidly, this is no different than the typical chatter we hear within X1 on a daily basis, both from our customers and our own workforce.  We are heavily dependent on PowerPoint for a full spectrum of uses, from internal meetings to analyst presentations to board meetings.   

As David Silverman stated in his response to the article on the HBR blog, PowerPoint presentations are typically “distributed far and wide” after the initial creation and meeting, leading to an instinct to cram a massive amount of information in each deck.   The result?  There is a ton of corporate IP sitting dormant in PowerPoint archives, both as attachments in email inboxes and within personal folders on individual employees’ computers.  Think of the time it takes to create just a single PowerPoint presentation, and the corresponding salary costs necessary to support this time.  Now multiply this figure hundreds, if not thousands, of times to address each new presentation and corresponding round of edits.  Multiply again over the thousands of individual employees working with PowerPoint in a large organization.  Pretty large figure, right?

This is precisely the type of problem that X1 was specifically architected to address.    As a result of the inevitability of information overload, “findability” is the key to unlocking the valuable information stashed away in email inboxes and disparate file folders.  Our product’s interface allows an individual to sort on a file type, here .ppt, and find an updated result set with each keystroke, all with a full preview of the PowerPoint presentation directly next to the search results.  We will not debate the value of PowerPoint (we use it a ton) nor will we take issue with the argument that it is overused.  It is difficult to argue, however, with the incredible amount of thought and analysis sitting in PowerPoint presentations scattered throughout the typical organization.  And it’s just as hard to argue that PowerPoint will be going away anytime soon. 

Is your organization doing everything you can to capture this latent IP?   Download a free trial of the X1 Professional Client and discover the helpful data and analysis in long-forgotten PowerPoint slides in your inbox and files.