PowerPoint: A Critique

Posted by Margaret Daisley

Do you know who Edward Tufte is? If not, you should. Do you frequently make and use PowerPoint presentations? If so, perhaps you shouldn’t. I rarely evangelize about other people’s products and services. But if you’ve got $10 left in your budget, and want a short tutorial on the “theory” of PowerPoint and how to use it by the expert, this is well worth the read and passing it around the office.

 

Edward Tufte’s “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint.” is an essay in booklet form, available on his web site for a mere $10.00. ($7.50 postpaid). 32 pages, full color.

 

Edward Tufte (skip to the next paragraph if you already know who he is), according to his on-line bio, “has written seven books, including Visual Explanations, Envisioning Information, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and Data Analysis for Politics and Policy. He writes, designs, and self-publishes his books on information design, which have received more than 40 awards for content and design. He is Professor Emeritus at Yale University, where he taught courses in statistical evidence, information design, and interface design. His current work includes digital video, sculpture, printmaking, and a new book Beautiful Evidence.”

In other words, in a world where portraying information is more important than getting the story, in fact – information IS the story -- Edward Tufte is hot, hot, hot. Having built a business out of his self-publication of books and lectures on the visual display of quantitative information, he now does a circuit of one-day courses (I attended one in New York a few years back.) He has developed a cult-like status among people in print and e-publishing venues whose job it is to absorb and best portray data and information—graphs, tables, illustrations of processes, and so on. (Among the several hundred attendees of the workshop I went to in New York, were many editors and art directors from the world’s most respected and popular publications. At the time, I was the research editor for The American Lawyer and Corporate Counsel.)

But I wasn’t quite aware of just how anti-PowerPoint Tufte was until I read this (from his own Web site):

 

In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. For many years, overhead projectors lit up transparencies, and slide projectors showed high-resolution 35mm slides. Now "slideware" computer programs for presentations are nearly everywhere. Early in the 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning out trillions of slides each year.

 

Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?

 

Yes, Tufte uses that peculiar academic vernacular occasionally. OK, frequently. But still his observations and arguments, by the end of the 32 pages (including photos, tables, and illustrations), become increasingly compelling. His goal is to convince you that miscommunication –  better: misuse of particular methods of communication, in this case PowerPoint – are not just offensive in the sense of aethestics and literacy, but may actually lead to death and national tragedy. Such was the case with NASA and the Challenger disaster. 

Some of the points he makes, always with an argument and facts to back up his case, include the fact that “bullet outlines dilute thought” and the low “resolution” of PowertPoint, compared to other communication methods, means that a lot of information is compromised by having to reduce it to even less than its essence, just to make it fit on a slide, formatted into a few bullet points. In one very amusing example, Tufte presents the Gettysburg Address as a PowerPoint presentation, rendering its beautiful language and message almost meaningless.

But I leave it up to you. You should, of course, take Edward Tufte with more than a grain of salt, but if you are someone who must, in the course of your job or your life, convey clear messages about information in presentations to groups of others, it would be good to become familiar with these ideas.