Power Point Resources
#Powerpoint is Pointless - #Stop Using Powerpoint
Vint Cerf: "Power corrupts and Powerpoint corrupts absolutely!"
We Have Met the Enemy
and
He Is PowerPoint
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint
slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but
looked more like a bowl of spaghetti. When we understand that slide, well have won the war, General
McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.
PowerPoint: Killer App? August 30, 2005; A17
Did PowerPoint make the space shuttle crash? Could it doom another mission? Preposterous
as
this may sound, the ubiquitous Microsoft "presentation software" has twice been singled out for
special criticism by task forces reviewing the space shuttle disaster.
Perhaps I've sat through too many PowerPoint presentations lately, but I think the
trouble with these critics is that they don't go far enough: The software may be as much of a
mind-numbing menace to those of us who intend to remain earthbound as it is to astronauts.
PowerPoint's failings have been outlined most vividly by Yale political scientist
Edward Tufte, a specialist in the visual display of information. In a 2003 Wired magazine
article headlined "PowerPoint Is Evil" and a less dramatically titled pamphlet,
"The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint," Tufte argued that the
program encourages "faux-analytical" thinking that favors the slickly produced "sales
pitch" over the sober exchange of information.
Exhibit A in Tufte's analysis is a PowerPoint slide presented to
NASA
senior managers in January 2003, while the space shuttle Columbia was in the air and the agency was
weighing the risk posed by tile damage on the shuttle wings. Key information was so buried and condensed
in
the rigid PowerPoint format as to be useless.
"It is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and
not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation," the Columbia Accident Investigation
Board
concluded, citing Tufte's work. The board devoted a full page of its 2003 report to the issue,
criticizing a space agency culture in which, it said, "the endemic use of
PowerPoint" substituted for rigorous technical analysis. SNIP
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