What’s Wrong with PowerPoint as a Document Authoring Tool?

In our McCulley/Cuppan consulting work we recently had a new client invite us to work with an authoring team on applying best practice to the planning, writing, and reviewing of a regulatory submission document. The document was going to be a significant piece of work, requiring over 500 pages and involving multiple authors across several scientific disciplines.

At the first meeting, the project leader announced she wants to continue the use of PowerPoint (PPT) as the document planning tool. Reasoning for this approach was in part because she and other team members already invested considerable time and effort in generating a 540+ slide deck representing data and messages to be in the regulatory document and PPT was a very familiar tool from extensive use in developing presentations.

I have to say we were mildly surprised by the demand to use PPT as the primary tool to plan and outline such a large, complex document. We have encountered other organizations using PPT for document planning purposes, but never on such a large scale. On the surface, the choice of PPT as the tool to produce initial draft documents seems reasonable. It is familiar to many, provides an authoring environment that produces output that can appear on screen as an outline, can be commented on in oral or remote review, and can be easily augmented and updated. All of these apparent benefits would support an argument for using PPT as an outlining tool to plan any and all documents. However, the use of this tool does not readily scale to developing large, complex technical documents.

Christine Haas, Karen Schriver, Thomas Huckin, Edward Tufte, and others tell us much about how readers interact with and read texts. From this collective body of work we have learned some things that can help us produce texts in an effective manner that, equally, is perceived as of very high quality. The prime method is to use tools that enable the design and review of texts as you expect your readers to engage in the reading and analysis of the text.

Successful collaborative authoring is significantly rooted in careful and thorough front-end planning. Choices of authoring tools are among the critical aspects of the document planning process, as tool choices impact (enabling or constraining) every other aspect of the planning and documentation processes. As authors and managers of authors, it is incumbent upon all of us to choose tools that accommodate our desired set of outcomes. Authors and managers must be cognizant of authoring tools that accommodate not only themselves and their ways of working, but others as well.

It is our position that use of PPT for document planning negatively impacts all potential collaborative authoring and review outcomes. Our claim assumes that the goal of the work is to generate an effective document, economically produced, that meets or exceeds end-user expectations.

I have outlined here key advantages and disadvantages of using PPT to plan and facilitate documentation of a multi-year, complex pharmaceutical development work.

PPT Advantages

• use is a habituated format; it’s familiar.

PPT Disadvantages

• presentations constrain data reporting rather than facilitate collaborative/interpretive processes (see my previous blog post on PowerPoint presentations).
• format creates/maintains a huge but fragmented vision of the process and product, impacting output (see Schriver and Tufte).
• PPT does not scale well to large documents as it limits information organization and searching is cumbersome, impacting review and the authors' ability to migrate material from PPT into a document-based format.
• PPT presentations do not accommodate major revisions/reorganization; impacting logic, content, and organization of the ultimate document product (see Schriver).
• the output decreases in clarity as the number of slides increases, impacting author/reviewer interpretation (see Tufte).
• PPT output is not a document; conversion to MS Word format is inefficient, time-consuming, and expensive.

The point seems clear in the choice of using PPT as an authoring tool is that familiarity wins, despite that, from a business, work, or quality perspective, the disadvantages of PPT clearly outweigh this single advantage. Eschewing proven document authoring platforms for the familiar may have unintended consequences and bear a high tariff.

Originally published on our Knowledge Management blog