I just read the essay by Edward R. Tufte, “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within.”

As an example of why not to use PowerPoint for technical reporting and presentations, he details its use by NASA in the analysis of the causes of the space shuttle Columbia disaster. His conclusion, and that of others, is NASA’s use of PowerPoint with its presentation limitations to communicate the data on the takeoff damage, while the spacecraft was still safe in space, grossly affected how it was interpreted by NASA management and thus resulted in the deaths of the Columbia astronauts. Powerful stuff.

Other examples of PPT’s inadequacies include showing statistical data in table format displayed as PPT slides (they are completely incomprehensible), the Gettysburg Address as a PPT presentation (pretty funny) and several references to business presentations of various purposes.

Several factors contribute to the skewing of information when using PowerPoint: limited space for meaningful test, segmentation of the message with slides, bulleted lists, hierarchical display of text, and useless phluff. Mr. Tufte continues to make the case that PowerPoint has a high signal to noise ratio, an extremely low transfer of information rate, dilution of information, and absurd style sheets, templates and effects. I can’t agree more. I hate PPT presentations and don’t use them myself. He favors text documents with paragraphs, sentences, diagrams and space to completely tell the story. I agree and by distributing handouts for meetings, people have something tangible to take away.

Put some creativity and effectiveness in your next presentation. Don’t use PowerPoint. I recommend this booklet for anyone needing some good reasons not to use the ubiquitous and dubious software – ever.