Stealth PowerPoint Is Everywhere

Many people think of PowerPoint as just for boardrooms and classrooms. But stealth PowerPoint is everywhere.

Let’s say you’re in another city for a conference. You know you’re going to be seeing PowerPoints in the sessions. But as you head down in the elevator from your hotel room in the morning, stop in a fast-food place for a coffee, and make your way through the conference venue, you may have passed at least three PowerPoint presentations without even realizing it.

In fact, you’re probably going by stealth PowerPoint presentations all the time in your everyday life. And they’re all made by the masters of stealth PowerPoint – ordinary people whose existence you may never even think about, unless you’re one of them. Here are just eight of the places you’ll see stealth PowerPoints.

Elevator info screens

When you get on a hotel elevator, there is probably a screen above the buttons showing you pictures of their spa, their restaurant, and various other attractions. This is likely a PowerPoint slide show. Why create proprietary software when you can just network screens to an ordinary computer running software everyone has? You may even have the same kind of thing in your office building and/or apartment building, with notices such as “Floor cleaning will occur from Setpember 12-15. Please use cation when walking on surfaces.” (Typos in building notices are common because the stealth PowerPoint master is a busy management person whose main job is not making slides. Hotel elevator slides are more likely made by the marketing department.)

Fast food menu boards

As you stop to get your coffee and quick bite, you’re looking at the menu screens above the counter, trying to decide what you want, and also waiting for the display to finish its feature promotion so it goes back to the screen showing you what things they have and how much they cost. These screens could be using proprietary software, but they could also just be running PowerPoint slide shows provided by the head office – all those fancy transitions are available in PowerPoint, after all. And someone has to make them and update them. As you’re waiting hungrily in line, do you ever wonder who these stealth PowerPoint masters are?

Wayfinding in venues

When you’re walking around a conference venue – or any of many other similar places, even including some shopping malls – there are often video screens with information about where things are and sometimes when they happen. And at the doors of conference rooms, there may be screens that show what session is happening in that room at that time. These aren’t just magically updated by the power of thought. Office staff or the event team input it all – and if you see the occasional error, well, they seldom have a dedicated proofreading team.

Schedule info

It’s not just at conference venues that you’ll have boards saying what’s happening at what time. Many movie theaters and concert venues also have screens with upcoming shows and acts. Sure, your local second-run theatre probably has an old board with lettering that’s put in by hand. But even the person who makes that board would likely be happier as a stealth PowerPoint master, updating it all from a computer in the office, like people in the newer places do. Not only would it take just a few minutes at the start or end of a shift, but if an error slipped in, they wouldn’t have to go out and redo all that work by hand with fussy plastic letters.

Waiting rooms

When you go to the doctor or dentist, do you read their magazines while you wait? You may not even have noticed that they cancelled all their subscriptions because people just sit and stare at their phones. But if there’s a TV screen, you might look up at it. It could be a news channel – not that that’s the best thing to watch, especially if you’re about to have your blood pressure tested. But some medical waiting rooms have nice, calming slide shows or bits of health information. And if you’re in the reception area for a corporate office, there may be a slide show all about how wonderful the company is and what great things its brands are accomplishing. It’s important to make a good first impression, after all. And it’s up to the stealth PowerPoint masters to make it happen.

Places of worship

Not everyone goes to church, or to other places where there is congregational singing, and of those who do, not everyone sees the words projected on a screen. There are places of worship with actual hymn books, and others that hand out printed leaflets. But there’s much to be said for the cost efficiency and flexibility of projecting the sing-along words on big screens. If you go once a week to a place where you sing along with words projected on screens, you’re almost certainly looking at PowerPoint slides. And when it says “Sign In The Morning” instead of “Sing in the Morning,” you probably know the stealth PowerPoint master whose fingers slipped, even if you don’t know who it is.

Supertitles in opera

There are also words on screen with music that you absolutely must not sing along with. If you go to the opera (as we all do from time to time, right?), there may be a nice screen high above the stage that gives English translations of the Italian or German that the performers are screaming, I mean singing. That screen is a narrow strip, and it may seem like it’s one of those LED reader boards. But it’s more likely PowerPoint slides, with just one line of white-on-black text projected on that narrow screen. The stage manager cues the technician to advance the slide at the appropriate moments, but a stealth PowerPoint master had to type those translations in first. And because it’s the opera, and the patrons are not only highly educated but often extremely pertinacious, it can’t have any errors.

Pre-trailers in movie theaters

And for those of us who are more likely to see a movie on the big screen? (Yes, you know, they still do show movies in theaters. You can go sit with dozens of strangers and smell the popcorn and drink soft drinks out of massive cups.) You won’t be watching the movie on a PowerPoint, of course, even though it’s technically possible to show videos and animations with PowerPoint. You won’t even be watching the trailers on PowerPoint. But how about those trivia questions and ads for popcorn and admonitions not to use your phone that you see if you arrive early enough? Ah, yes, those. They may well be PowerPoint, running off a fifteen-year-old computer in the projection booth. And somewhere there’s a stealth PowerPoint master who had to sit and do all the formatting and type in all the words and make sure they’re correct – probably someone working in the movie theater chain’s office.

A point of empowerment

Yes, you’re surrounded by stealth PowerPoint all day, all around town. And the stealth PowerPoint masters are mostly not people you would think of as working in PowerPoint. They will never stand in front of their slides and talk about them. Most of them don’t have editors and proofreaders to help them, either. But, though many of them may not know it, they can have one more thing besides the spelling checker in PowerPoint to help them make their slides as good as they can: the suite of style and consistency checks in PerfectIt, which is now available for PowerPoint.

PerfectIt is industry-standard software for editors, but it can also be a labor-saver (and sometimes butt-saver) for the stealth PowerPoint masters. Once they’ve made (or updated) the slide deck, they can run PerfectIt and make sure they have their capitalization right, their punctuation correct and consistent, no sneaky errors slipping in (sign for sing is not the worst of them), and – if they input names such as of brands and people into a custom style sheet, or if their head office makes a style sheet for them – they can make sure that all the names are right, too. After all, these stealth PowerPoints are powerful stealth marketing tools, and good-looking text is good marketing. And, more to the point, sloppy text is bad marketing, no matter where it is.

And if you actually are one of these unsung people who make these PowerPoints, and you don’t already have PerfectIt, here’s how to download a free trial and see for yourself.