“You always wanted to perform, but they told you to get a job,” read the invitation to the PowerPoint karaoke party. I had a job as a second-year analyst at a bank and no singing voice, so the words “PowerPoint” and “karaoke” both set off a wave of anxiety.

Mercifully, no ears were harmed in the course of that evening’s events in a Brooklyn basement flat in early 2009 – no singing was involved. Partygoers instead took turns at giving presentations using slides they had never seen before. Such competitions have also been called “Battledecks” – or a “BS Contest” when Harvard Business School got in on it.

The roars of laughter and rainbow of presentations at the karaoke night demonstrated the multiple uses of slideshow software: standalone documents, presentation materials, pitches and more. But despite such uses being discrete, a single PowerPoint file is often expected to serve multiple purposes at once. When it then fails to cope, the software is blamed instead of our own misplaced expectations.