Powerpoint as a poor mans’ CMS

At work we’ve been experimenting with using Powerpoint to enable people to generate web-based tutorials quickly and easily. Powerpoint has some advantages as a sort of inexpensive content management system.

Powerpoint has many of the qualities of a simple content management system: WYSIWYG editing, dynamic updating of internal links, dynamic menu generation. It lacks permissions and any kind of overall framework to manage multiple files, but for individual items, it works well.

Corporate people seem to love it, and know how to use it at least a little. Powerpoint exports rapidly to web format. It’s fonts and page sizes adjust to the size of the window, with no loss of resolution.