Powerpoint in the Wrong Hands

First off, I would like to say Tufte is a pompous bastard. Second of all, maybe I've been privileged while he's been living under a rock, but I've never made a PowerPoint without creating documents to go with it—even in high school. PowerPoint is not meant to be a document in itself, it is a visual aid. In college, I have never made a PowerPoint presentation without having a handout with more concrete information with paragraphs and fleshed out ideas. What does Tufte expect people in meetings to do with sheets of block text? "Okay guys, take the next 10 minutes to read over the handout and then I'm going to make a presentation covering the same exact thing that is written in the handout. Any questions?" I'm all for having handouts with PowerPoint, but I assume that's for you to look at after the presentation (or before) in case you don't remember everything they talked about in the meeting. PowerPoint is an outline for the speaker to make sure they don't go off track and to point out the important POINTS of the speech, which the speaker will then flesh out in his or her words. There are plenty of teachers I wish would have an outline for their classes without wasting my time on pointless rambles.

Tufte acts as if PowerPoint is used as the basis for all meetings etc. For example, he complains that students are using PowerPoint in school instead of writing a report (not true, by the way) and that "students would be better off if schools closed down on PP days and everyone went to The Exploratorium" (7). I feel like I shouldn't be qualified to say this since I'm only a lowly college student talking about a well-established whatever-he-is, but my God he is dense.

I agree with Tufte that NASA was being lazy in using PowerPoint in place of actual documents, but half of his points on the subject had nothing to do with PowerPoint. On page 9 Tufte shoots his mouth (or keyboard) off criticizing their PowerPoint and how skeletal it is for a presentation. Was he present for the presentation? Did he hear them make the presentation? I'm sure they didn't just read off the bullet points (granted, some college students do that) but used them as reference guides to show their audience the core findings in their research. Tufte also gets enraged on page 11 that the people who made the slide used 3 different ways in showing the same unit of measurement. How is that PowerPoint's fault? Sounds to me like it is the people who made the PowerPoint screwed up. On that note, backtracking to page 9, Tufte criticizes PowerPoint (and basically blames PowerPoint for the destruction of the shuttle) because the pros were in bigger letters near the beginning of the PP and the cons were in smaller font at the end of the PP. Again, how is that the fault of PP? Sure, try to blame technology, but we as humans are the ones who put this all together. The people who made the presentation are the ones who decided the order of their presentation. Even if they hadn't skewed it on PP, they probably would have done the same thing on paper by placing the more optimistic information at the beginning of the paper and the negative things at the end. We love to hide things that makes us look bad.

I do agree with Tufte that it is often annoying that everything is so disjointed on PowerPoint, but you can shrink the text and do comparisons with more than two graphs or texts with a little extra effort.

Another sentence I found amusing was on page 12 when Tufte said "The choice of headings, arrangement of information, and size of bullets on the key chart served to highlight what management already believed" (emphasis mine). Answer me this, Tufte: Who decides what to put as the heading? Who arranges the information on a slide? Who can control the size of bullet points? Let me answer it for you: The people who made the slides, not PowerPoint.

If what Tufte is saying is true about PowerPoint being used as the sole source of information, I understand his worry about misinformation or not being able to write a competent report, white paper or analysis. At the moment, I'm finding it hard to believe that most companies don't use detailed reports in addition to PowerPoints at meetings, which would be sad and pathetic.

On page 15 Tufte is grasping at straws in his attempt to tear down PowerPoint. It's pretty pathetic. He thinks that "thin visual content prompts suspicions: 'What are they leaving out? Is that all they know? Does the speaker think we're stupid?' 'what are they hiding?'" Let me just clarify by saying I've never had any of these thoughts, nor do I know anyone who thinks this way about PowerPoint. Everyone knows (but apparently not Tufte) that the meat of the topic is not in PowerPoint, but in what the speaker is talking about. They use their words (and hopefully handouts) to show us what they know. It's proven that we can only learn so much in one sitting, so by using PowerPoint it just helps us focus on the key points we should remember, not some random point we thought was more important than it actually was.

His spoof on Abraham Lincoln's address was also a joke. That speech was not meant to inform people, but to encourage them. PowerPoints are used for informational purposes, not to help make pep-talks. That's like a football coach using a PowerPoint slide on giving his team a pep-talk before a game.

I had a hard time taking Tufte seriously. I am one of those kids who grew up on PowerPoint who dusn't. kno How; to write: a fuLL grummaticl sentince w/ a sbject n’ a verb. What do I know?