The MBAlmer has learned that the decisive UW Business School victory at the Western Conference Case Competition last month is primarily due to the strategic and extensive use of PowerPoint animations and clip art.

Above: UW MBA Nick Clapper, whose PowerPoint skills "saved the day."

Engineered by Class of 2005 MBA Nicholas Clapper, the 22-slide, 50 MB PowerPoint file was said to have been "the shit" by presentation attendees.

"I swear to God, if Nick hadn't been there, I don't know what we would have done," said '05 MBA Lily Chou. "Our case analysis was horrible. There was nothing to work with - the data was garbage, we had virtually no time, and everyone was bickering."

"Then Nick fired up PowerPoint and things got a whole lot better."

Clapper has downplayed his role, saying, "The presentation was solid. It just needed a little punching up."

The annual Western Conference Case Competition is the oldest and most prestigious case competition on the West coast. Students from business schools across the country compete against one another in five-person teams. This year's Western Conference took place on January 22 and 23 in Los Angeles, California. The UW beat several prestigious runners-up, including Stanford, Harvard, Wharton, Kellogg and MIT, to claim the $25,000 grand prize. The UW was represented by five students - Clapper, Chou, Whit Spencer, Mike Dietzman and Mark Showalter.

According to eyewitnesses, things started to go wrong for the UW team from the moment the plane departed Seattle. "Dietzman had the flu," said one anonymous source, "And was in a nasty mood. Showalter and Spencer were bickering about Wal-Mart. Clapper was playing Halo on his laptop, and Chou was plowing through Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire. Nobody seemed to understand what they were up against."

Things reportedly got worse for the team as the day went on. Trouble at LAX substantially delayed the team's arrival, which shortened the amount of available time for working on the case. Upon receipt of the case itself, however, Showalter "went through the roof" and started complaining about "those Harvard guys." Said Dietzman, "The case was pretty bad. It was riddled with typos and full of conflicting data. We had a hard time making any sense out of it at all. After banging away on it for about five hours, it was, like, one in the morning and everyone was hungry. We had nothing really to say about anything. I suggested we at least try to pull our assumptions together into some kind of presentation. And then I went for pizza."

	Above: One of the slides from the "amazing" PowerPoint deck.

At this point, Clapper booted his copy of Microsoft PowerPoint 2003, saying, "Well, let's see what we can do."

Team members were then treated to a demonstration of what Spencer calls, "God-like PowerPoint skills." Working for six hours straight, Clapper selected slide backgrounds and clip art, picked fonts and sizes, and then applied all manner of transitions and animations to virtually every object on the screen.

"Nick's motto was, 'if it can take an animation, it's getting an animation'," recalled Chou.

By the time UW was called to present at 8 AM, the team had been up all night and the file, "UWPreso5.ppt" has swelled to more than 50 MB in size. Too large to e-mail to himself, Clapper had to run down to a local Kinko's to purchase a USB keychain drive in order to transfer the slide deck to the designated PC in the presentation room.

Attendees were, according to all sources, blown away.

"It was incredible," said judge Gillian Morris. "Text was flying in on the screen, sometimes doing backflips. A lot of times, new stuff would appear on the screen with these WHOOSH noises. They'd picked just the right graphics to tell their story. When they mentioned partnering with other firms, there was a picture of a handshake. When they talked about profitability, I saw a hand holding a bag of money. It really underscored their core message."

"Truthfully, I was pretty underwhelmed by the UW team at first," concurred Bernard Sumner. "They were very, very unfocused. Their observations about the case seemed both superficial and somewhat contradictory. But when I saw those slides zoom in, zoom out, and fade away with that 'explosion' noise, I thought - WOW! These guys know how to razzle-dazzle!"

It was unknown at press time if Clapper planned to spend part of his $25,000 prize on a copy of the Microsoft PowerPoint 2003 Expansion Pack.