PowerPoint=bad?

I'm finishing up a book on effective communications, and the last chapter is reserved for condemning the use of PowerPoint. As you can tell by the links to the right under "resources," I frequently use PowerPoint as a visual aid, especially in speeches that are lengthy.

The author in this specific book makes a good case against PowerPoint. It undermines what's going on behind the lectern, he says, and in addition, the power of a speech is one of the last human-to-human communication forms we have left. He also points out that some PowerPoint presentations can be condescending, especially the presentations that are an exact copy of the words being read by the speaker. "It's as if the audience can't understand the spoken word unless they also read it," he says.

Good points. I've already created a PowerPoint for my next presentation, which is tomorrow. I'm going to side with the author and scale it back to a few slides to make a couple of points that I think require a visual.