PowerPoint is a fine presentation tool, but some people have elevated it to the level of a cult. The most recent member of the PowerPoint cult was a customer who decided to use PowerPoint in an email message.

No, I don’t mean that the customer attached a bad PowerPoint presentation to the email. I mean that the customer’s email was itself a three-slide PowerPoint presentation.

Well, not quite.

What they actually did was create a three-slide presentation, then take screenshots of each slide and embed them in the email.

Well, not quite.

The screenshots were shrunk to save size. Each page from the PowerPoint presentation contained about 50 words of text. Which were very hard to read because the screenshots were shrunk.

The PowerPoint presentation itself was a shortened form of your typical boring PowerPoint slide presentation. The first slide was an introduction to the program they were using. The second slide was a statement of the problem they were having. The third slide was a call to action for Microsoft to assist in determining why the program was having the problem.

Thank goodness it didn’t have a concluding “Any questions?” slide.