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7 September 2015

Why I Write in PowerPoint Nancy Duarte

JULY 27, 2015

When writing business documents (aside from emails), most people turn to word-processing software. That’s not the only option. You can do everything — outlines, drafts, revisions, and even layouts, if you’d like — in PowerPoint or similar presentation programs.

That’s what I’ve used to write my books, internal documents, sales collateral, and web copy, for several reasons:

I can brainstorm with abandon. Because PowerPoint is so modular, it allows me to block out major themes (potential sections or chapters) and quickly see if I can generate ample ideas to support them. In early stages, each slide resembles a Pinterest board, with a simple but descriptive title, some rough text, and a few sketched or found images that clarify the concepts. If I can’t produce enough insights for a particular theme, I abandon it before spending too much time crafting language. It’s easy to drag individual slides to the end of the deck, in case I’d like to revisit them later, or just delete them.

Below you can see an excerpt from the PowerPoint draft of my second book, Resonate. Every slide represents a two-page spread. The content is much denser than it would be on a typical slide, but that’s okay because it’s meant to be printed, not projected. And anyway, it’s a work in progress.


This was the idea-generation phase. In addition to the rough text and the bevy of images for inspiration, I included citations and links (in green) at the bottom of each page (the gray area) so I could have ready access to my research.

Here’s one spread, before and after the designer got ahold of it:

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