Microsoft has changed the way we communicate, fundamentally and not in a good way.

It’s not something we really think about in particular, since there’s so much else they’ve done, having an incredibly pervasive influence on every aspect of the way we deal with computers, especially through the way they have decided to deal with software licenses and, of course, through the near-complete dominance of the Windows operating system on the home and especially the business desktop.

But that’s not what I want to talk about here: what I want to discuss is how Word, and to a much greater extent PowerPoint has made it harder for people to communicate clearly and directly.

Word: though Word is almost certainly the most successful program ever used for document creation, it’s broken. It’s broken because it tries to be a layout program as well as a text editor. Not only that, it’s a giant layout program and a giant text editor. It combines content and presentation, so it’s got too many functions for the casual user to easily master (here’s an essay about the problem of “WYSIWYG” word processors from a Wake Forest professor).

No longer can you easily type out a memo, you have to choose the correct style and fiddle with the settings so that your font doesn’t change from 10-point Arial to 18-point Times New Roman without telling you why. A lot of casual users don’t understand styles at all, and very computer-literate people often don’t understand exactly how or why Word does what it does with styles. Word is obscure and difficult. If you ask me, Word needs to be pared down so that what it does is more transparent to the user, at least.

But the real culprit for the death of good communication in the business world is:

PowerPoint: This program has replaced the clear explanations of good writing with vague promises and wooly-headed thinking, delivered complete with cheesy art and transitions. It’s bad enough that PowerPoint has become the standard way to give a talk (how many times have you heard a presenter just reading the slides?), it’s far worse that it has replaced other, better kinds of communication–many of the most respected consulting companies in the world now deliver reports in PowerPoint format, rather then in memos or other text-intensive forms, and it’s now the default way for the Pentagon to document plans and ideas.

As Edward Tufte explains so eloquently in his essay “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint,” PowerPoint makes it hard to understand the relationship among the ideas or points it describes. They’re just bullet points under other, bigger bullet points. You are left to wonder if the smaller bullets are parallel effects of the big point, if they are caused by the big bullet point, or if there’s any relationship at all: the layout doesn’t make it clear.

And it’s not just that PowerPoint makes these uses possible, it actively causes these bad uses, by providing “helpful” templates to users. These templates encourage the use of visual doodads rather than good reasoning and even good layout. So a “good” PowerPoint is one that makes a visual impression rather than impressing with good ideas or analysis.