I've been sick the past several days and in a mental fog, therefore not posting as much as usual. While surfing mindlessly, I found a very interesting resource online in A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods.
If you have any interest in information visualization, as I do, you will find this a useful resource. It is a well-designed visual encyclopedia of methods, with multiple categorizations and a cool underlying metaphor.
You'll note that just about everything PowerPoint can do for you is found in the insipid yellow column on the left. This puts some perspective to information architecture guru Edward Tufte's diatribes against PowerPoint (e.g., this brief analysis of a single slide from the Columbia disaster, taken from his book on the subject, which is nicely parodied in a hilarious 2003 post in Aaron Swartz's blog, available in nicely formatted PDF at this URL).
What's cool is all the other possibilities you have at your fingertips. There is no excuse for a bad presentation!
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