Gloriously unfiltered post on why the iA Writer/Presenter people are all in on Markdown by letting rip about what they think of MS Office.
Some highlights:
Why are we sending our kids to a school that looks like a Microsoft ad? To prepare them for the future. Does equipping children with Office tools truly serve this purpose or does it serve the purpose of cementing a life in the products of a software monopolist?
There is no other app that can make you look so busy and serious doing nothing and saying nothing as PowerPoint. It’s a pro tool for creating bullshit.
Instead of engaging in genuine thought, writing, and learning, you can now fully embrace the role of an office worker—mastering the art of appearing knowledgeable without true understanding. Finally, you can devote yourself entirely to formatting and the façade of productivity. In fact, with the advent of Copilot, even these tasks can be automated. Your presence is no longer required. The latest iteration of Word completes this descent into the abyss…
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I strongly disagree with the sentiment about Powerpoint. Though I prefer the simpler Keynote, they are both powerful and useful applications in their own context. You can’t do in Markdown what you can in those apps any more than you can replace Excel with it.
It goes back to Edward Tufte, of course, and god knows a lot of what’s done with PowerPoint deserves it. My own beef with it is somewhat different and comes (showing my age here) from watching PowerPoint crush all its superior rivals by being given away free for twenty years. Keynote is much better (the Magic Move transition is worth every bell and whistle in PowerPoint) but still not a patch on MORE, with which I could literally whip an outline for a full lecture slideshow and handout together in the ten-minute gap between classes (and at that stage in my career often had to) thanks to its auto-parsing of outline structures. iA Presenter, which I like and use a lot, has some of the MORE spirit, though it’s such a radical implementation of their md-centric, content-first philosophy that I suspect it’s only for the serious Markdown/CSS nerds.
But I agree that PowerPoint (and Keynote) can do far more interesting things than create bullshit. Nancy Duarte’s slide:ology promotes the idea of PowerPoint documents as standalone multimedia documents (sans presenter, commentary, or live presentation); her free Slidedocs document (in PowerPoint) is both an exposition and a demonstration of the possibilities. (It’s fine to give them your e-mail address to download; I’ve never had anything from them.) I have students do these as an assessment option in one of my classes; they’re a great training in visual and multimedia communication, not least because everybody knows how to use PowerPoint and it’s basically an integrated multimedia creation package in itself.
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I actually have created a Keynote presentation for some support or training purposes. And as an artist, it is sometimes just nice to do something so highly visual 
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Yes, visual communication is a real thing and a real skill that PowerPoint could be quite good at teaching if we did actually teach it, rather than leaving students to figure it out. A line mine are sick of hearing from me is “The humble arrow is your best friend.” (It can also of course be a superweapon for vacuity dressed as meaning, but one step at a time…)
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