Over the past year and a bit, I've been using PowerPoint more and more as a design tool. It's obviously useful as a tool for creating pitches and the like - that's basically using it for its primary function - but there are other areas in which it can prove useful.
Game Flow
In many ways, it's much better than Word for creating documents that convey a sense of flow - guiding someone through your design thoughts or a particular game path for example. I've used it to go point-to-point through the first draft of a tutorial, I've used it to show the main flow through a front end, to illustrate paths through menus and to game out a couple of scenarios in a soccer design.
Drawing and ting
Not being the most skilled artist in the world has its disadvantages when you're creating documents that need to impress fickle publishers. The obvious thing to do when creating docs that need to impress is to actually get an artist involved, but in mid-size studios where resources are always stretched that's not always practical. PowerPoint does quite a neat line in vector drawing; there are loads of pre-set shapes, you can edit splines if you want to get really technical, you can add effects if you want to jazz things up. It’s great for mocking up interfaces, doing flow diagrams, illustrating control systems and the like. It never looks like final art - there’s just something a little too...middle management(?) about the whole thing - so there’s no danger of it ever being perceived as such, but likewise it’s better than some crappy Visio spread that never quite fits on a page.
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