Customer Reviews

The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within, Second Edition

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If there were a fan club for Edward Tufte, I would gladly sign up to be an officer. His three books changed the way I think about presenting information, and added the invaluable term "chartjunk" to my vocabulary. I was enormously excited to learn that he had written about Powerpoint and could hardly wait to lay my hands on the publication. Unfortunately, it wasn't worth the wait.

To those thinking about buying this booklet (28 pages) let me save you the expense by summarizing it:

PowerPoint slides don't have much information in them, and you're limited to a sequential presentation order.

That's about it. His booklet is an extended indictment of the limitations of PowerPoint. Anyone interested in suggestions for Powerpoint improvements will find a refernce on the last page in a postscript to read the third chapter of his book, Visual Explanations, or visit his web site.

Do that instead of reading this booklet.

Edward Tufte is the foremost advocate of communicating complex data simply and clearly in the world today. It was naturally only a matter of time before he cast a critical eye on the software most responsible for dumbing down information transfer across the fruited plains---PowerPoint.

Don't worry: Tufte's criticisms of the software package are not the latest round of Microsoft-bashing from an academic elite practically wed to its Macs.

Rather, Tufte sets his sights on bigger and more rewarding game: how presenters have watered down their presentation styles to suit off-the-rack presentation templates provided by this software package.

His thesis is as simple and elegant as his goal of streamlined, impactful communication. PowerPoint lacks the resolution necessary to convey a rich stream of information to the presentation audience.

If you're inclined to defend the software, ask yourself if you've endured the following in a PowerPoint slideshow:

- An unending stream of bullet lists or "talking points" consisting of a handful of words per slide

- Branding (logos, headers, footers, titles etc) which takes up a large portion of available slide real estate

- "Sesame Street" style animations which obscure rather than illuminate the subject matter

- Distracting audio cues which draw the audience's attention away from the speaker and toward "the machine that goes, 'PING'"

Or try a simpler exercise: Think back to the best talk or pitch you can recall. Was PowerPoint employed? I suspect not; and for good reason, as Tufte argues.

Sadly, thanks to the ubiquity of the software, the abuse of PowerPoint has consequences far beyond bored audiences. In a particularly powerful section of the essay, Tufte demonstrates how PowerPoint contributed to the space shuttle Columbia disaster.

Since my purchase of this pamphlet, I have shared it widely with my PowerPoint-happy colleagues. The result, I'm happy to say, has been far more impactful and dynamic presentations which do not shirk on the data.

Once my dog-eared copy circulates widely enough (or enough freeloaders buy their own), my company may well break off the shackles of boring meetings and overly-slick sales pitches once and for all.

After the first read, I was disappointed with Edward Tufte's essay on PPTs. I was expecting more practical suggestions from the master of visualizing information; steps we could all take to make our PPTs better. This essay mostly gives graphic examples of bad PPTs. We've all seen plenty of bad PPTs in our lives. Do we really need to pay Mr. Tufte to see more?

The point of the essay seems to be, instead of trying to make your PPTs better, you shouldn't even bother using the evil software package from Microsoft. Instead, make a nice handout for your audience.

So I decided to perform a test. I was involved in an internal presentation to a different group in the company. One by one, eight different managers gave a 10 to 15 minute presentation to a group of about 25 people. While the other managers worked on their PPTs, got their laptops ready, and made sure a screen and a Boxlight would be in the conference room, I worked on a one-page handout. My presentation would stand by itself, without the crutch of PPT illuminating the wall behind me; the handout would supplement my presentation, and would allow the audience to take something physical back to their offices.

After the presentations were over, the audience was asked to fill out a survey. To summarize, they hated the handouts, loved the PPTs. And the PPT presentation they loved the best was one of the most hideous examples I had ever seen--one Mr. Tufte would have had a field day tearing apart, one slide at a time.

I agree that too many presenters use bad PPTs as a crutch, and as presenters we should rely more on handouts as a secondary communication tool. However, in my own experience the audience seems to want and *expect* PPTs-in which case a bad PPT might be more effective than no PPT at all. Read Tufte's essay and take his points to heart, but ultimately, KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE!

I'm a big fan of Tufte's series of three well-known books on information display. I respect the man's opinions completely, and look to him for the best advice on connecting information to the human mind.

That's why this booklet (28pp, covers included) disappoints me - he just doesn't live up to his own standard. As he did with the Challenger space shuttle's disaster years ago, he uses this book to analyze the presentations that contributed to the loss of the Columbia shuttle and crew. In the Challenger case, he showed some of the mis- and dis-informative displays, and how they could have been converted to tools for making decisions. In the Columbia case, he only went half-way: what was wrong, not how to make it right.

The rest of the booklet follows the same pattern: what's wrong, with very few positive, definite suggestions for mitigating or circumventing the problems. His conclusion is that PowerPoint is hopelesly flawed, and I have to agree. That's just not enough, though. Given its dire failings, and given that its use is pervasive and sometimes compulsory, what specific steps can we as viewers and presenters take in order to transfer information anyway?

This is a great half of a book: the problem statement. His bad examples are wonderfully bad. Unfortunately, the missing second half is replaced by little more than one sentence on the inside back cover: "Well, I can recommend 3 books on how to present visual evidence!"

Please, Mr. Tufte. You can do better, you have done better, and your readers deserve better.

//wiredweird

Edward Tufte has his own fan club of people looking on how to present visual information. However, his work is largely on how to present information graphically in print. That's the first mistake of this book, and it's illustrated by Tufte's favorite infographic (not shown in this pamphlet) - the contemporary illustration showing the decimation of Napoleon's troops as they invaded Russia in 1812.

While this is great way of illustrating a large number of figures, it just doesn't work in PowerPoint. And the reason is that in print, you can expect the reader to pore over one of your points at his own rate, whereas in a presentation you have to present bite-size pieces so that audiences can get the idea immediately.

Presenters don't even get this basic idea, so don't expect PowerPoint presentations to be good. In fact, there's a cult of "bad is good enough," which makes me wonder how many other facets of doing business would people admit to be "good enough."

Other "faults" of PowerPoint are shown here. The Gettysburg address as a PowerPoint presentation was manufactured as a joke, so it's hardly a damning indictment of the program. The authors of the NASA slides which downplayed dangers to the Space Shuttle could also have downplayed them in a written report, and probably did. At the meeting where the slides were shown numerous people had concerns, but they felt that any dangers were just brushed aside.

Until you have a culture of doing better in presentations, no one will be happy. People have no idea how to present giving priority to the message and nothing but.

Tufte says that presentations are bad, like no one else knew that. But most presenters are in companies that don't value good presentations and make no effort on finding out how to create them.

Until that culture changes we will always have bad presentations and people complaining about them.

I fundamentally agree with Tufte; PowerPoint is ugly and, when forced upon a hapless audience, terribly yawn-provoking.

However, Tufte would be much more convincing if he followed his own principles in this essay.

Tufte claims that PP is by nature flawed, since it promotes simplistic cognitive strategies and allows only for presentations that are confusing at best, misleading at worst. But his own presentation of this argument is misleading, in that much of the evidence he provides are PP presentation features made awkward by the users of PP, not by PP itself.

For example, in his detailed analysis of a NASA PP slide (pp. 8-9), Tufte explains how the slide's title claim is undermined, even contradicted, by the subsequent smaller-print support: the title is optimistic about the Columbia shuttle's "Review of Test Data," while the small print underneath is negative on that review. But surely this is a problem with the person who wrote the copy, not with PP? The same kind of "bad writing," in which a writer promises something early in the piece only to break that promise, happens in many media, from college essays to presidential speeches.

In fact, none of Tufte's criticisms on the Columbia slide are clearly attributable to PP itself, but rather to its users. The slide's overuse of the word "significant"? The writer's bad word choice. Inconsistent use of volume abbreviations? Bad proofreading. The typographic "orphans" (single words scrolled over to the next line)? Easily countered by the user's pressing the Enter key before the previous word, so that it joins its orphan on the next line.

Tufte's other examples similarly fail to point out a general systemic problem with PP as opposed to its users. This is a shame, because he's basically right: PP presentations generally promote lame, dull, simplistic bullet-riddled discourse. And as Tufte points out, there ARE alternatives. Maybe he could spend more time discussing these?

Basically, this is an elegant set of arguments against using Power Point.... for anything. Everything that Power Point users hold near and dear are torn apart in this short treatment.

The problem is that Tufte offers no way to use Power Point more effectively, except as a "low resolution slide projector." So, if you want to bash Power Point and are not looking for ways to improve your PPT presentations, this is the book for you.

I bemoan the wholesale conversion of lecture slides and overheads to Power Point for no particular reason other than to "become contemporary." But paying even $8.00 for the privilege of being told not to use Power Point is probably not what most instructors have in mind.

Spend a little more on The Visual Display of Quantitative Inormation and have something that truly teaches you something.

Tufte's latest text is a short pamphlet on the cognitive style of PowerPoint, that is, how a rigidly hierarchical, perhaps Stalinist, piece of software shapes the thoughts of both the presenter and his or her audience. The results are not pretty.

He presents his case using real and fictional examples. An reimagnition of the Gettysburg Address as a deck demonstrates how the lapidary oratory of Lincoln can be rendered a hopeless mess. The results are as amusing as they are convincing.

More important is the use of NASA presentations on the Columbia disaster. Tufte illustrates how NASA's engineers and its vendors can turn critical information into a incomprehensible data junkyard. The consequences in this case illustrate the far reaching impact of the tool and its potentially tragic consequences.

After reading this very persuasive piece, it's clear to me exactly how PowerPoint can be misused to deceive, confuse, and bore. The problem in almost every case is the tool itself. PowerPoint forces its totalitarian nature on the user demanding that one "shape the facts to fit the deck" by oversimplifying and thoughtless structuring.

Ultimately, Tufte accepts that fact that PowerPoint is pervasive. He concludes by offering suggestions as to how to make the best of a bad situation. The design points alone are worth the price of the pamphlet.

o)
o) PowerPoint dumbs down tricky concepts
o) Handouts good
o) Good presentations hard

OK, enough of that, but just the fact that even this cursory review looks silly in what Tufte calls "The Cognitive Style of Power Point", shows that he does have a point. This pamphlet is a damning indictement of most of us who give frequent presentations with PowerPoint, the quality of those presentations, and a call to arms to clean up our act.

Other reviewers here claim that Power Point itself isn't bad, rather, the presentations themselves are. Tufte rebuts this claim himself, pointing out the overwhelming percentage of presentations generated by Power Point are lame. Surely, people are capable of making good presentations, so it must be the tool. He also suggests a remedy for better presentations: only use a projector to project a few key, information-dense graphics. Give a paper hand-out that participants can take notes on. And, of course, practice becoming a better speaker. The hidden message here, is that good presentations are hard work, and require a lot of practice, background work, and a good speaker. No amount of fancy software will ever make up for that.

Brevity is the biggest weakness of this pamphlet, and most of Tufte's work -- we are left yearning for more of a good thing.

Tufte is an gifted analyst and communicator, but seems to have taken the easy way out on this publication. He rails against the limitations of PowerPoint, of which there are many, but does not provide much in the way of practical recommendations.