The Secret of PowerPoint’s Popularity

No one can dispute that PowerPoint (PPT) is the most popular presentation tool. Initially aimed at “managers, knowledge workers and salespeople”, it has become the standard for explaining anything to anyone. Despite the growth of sophisticated analytical and visualization tools, such as Business Intelligence (BI) and Big Data analytics, new applications are not making a sizeable impact in MR yet.
The recent Greenbook Research Industry Trends Report (GRIT) (2015) publicized that 86% of researchers use PPT to present research results. The position of PPT is driven by its dominance in reporting, charting and infographics.
With that in mind, DataPlay team initiated a research project to understand:
Why do researchers continue to use PPT for reporting?
The research instruments included secondary data analysis and online survey. The analysis is based on sample of 824 respondents recruited via social media channels.
Discussion of Main Findings
Our survey demonstrated fairly close results to GRIT findings mentioned above. 82 % of respondents reported to use PPT. The majority of those researchers who use PPT are utilizing the tool for delivering research findings to their clients or other stakeholders within the company (See Table 1).
So, why is PPT so popular with researchers? The first reason for this is historical. When it was released in the late 80’s, PPT was genuinely revolutionary. Before PPT the only visual aid for presenters were whiteboards or fixed slides, which had to be drawn beforehand. Secondly, PPT comes packaged with Microsoft’s Windows, the operating system which has a dominant position in the market.

The most prominent answer among researchers to question “Why do you use MS PPT?” was ease of learning and usage (See Table 2). Indeed, technically PPT is very user friendly and most people have at least some familiarity with the software from educational institutions.
To summarize, the implication of the study conducted by DataPlay are:
Researchers still use PPT for reporting because of its convenience and simplicity.
