PowerPoint
PowerPoint is frequently misused, in that it's wrongly viewed by too many presenters as the be-all and the end-all of a presentation. They overload their slides with all the information that needs to be presented because, again, the PowerPoint is, they believe, the entire presentation. In the end, they have text-heavy slides—and usually way too many slides—which only leads to a distracted audience that is busy reading instead of listening.
PowerPoint is but one part of a presentation.
Properly used, PowerPoint provides visual aids that enhance what the presenter is saying and helps draw the audience members in, so that they are listening even more intently.
PowerPoint also offers some great tools to visually represent a theme or convey a message that is hard to put into words. For example, in the "Constructing Futures" PowerPoints I've posted here, I used animation to show how an abandoned house was transformed through the program (slide 5).
Jackson County
This PowerPoint was created as part of a presentation explaining how this one Jackson County program addresses three important issues: 1) vacant homes and the problems associated with them; 2) providing job training for former prison inmates; 3) helping the homeless.