The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within

by Edward R. Tufte

Describes how to improve PowerPoint presentations.

Genres: Design, Nonfiction, Business, Communication, Education, Psychology, Reference

32 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Edward Rolf Tufte (born 1942 in Kansas City, Missouri to Virginia and Edward E. Tufte), a professor emeritus of statistics, graphic design, and political economy at Yale University has been described by The New York Times as "the Leonardo da Vinci of Data". He is an expert in the presentation of informational graphics such as charts and diagrams, and is a fellow of the American Statistical Association. Tufte has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences.

Tufte currently resides in Cheshire, Connecticut. He periodically travels around the United States to offer one-day workshops on data presentation and information graphics.

Note: Some books by this author have been published under the name Edward Tufte.

Reviews

[☘Misericordia☘ ⚡ϟ⚡⛈⚡☁ ❇️❤❣ · Rating 5 out of 5]

YES!

Q:
When Louis Gerstner became president of IBM, he encountered a big company caught up in ritualistic slideware-style presentations (c)
Q:
Slideware helps speakers to outline their talks, to retrieve and show diverse visual materials, and to communicate slides in talks, printed reports, and internet. And also to replace serious analysis with chartjunk, over-produced layouts, cheerleader logotypes and branding, and corny clip art. (c)
Q:
PP convenience for the speaker can be costly to both content and audience. These costs result from the cognitive style characteristic of the standard default PP presentation: foreshortening of evidence and thought, low spatial resolution, a deeply hierarchical single-path structure as the model for organizing every type of content, breaking up narrative and data into slides and minimal fragments, rapid temporal sequencing of thin information rather than focused spatial analysis, conspicuous decoration and Phruff, a preoccupation with format not content, an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch. (c)
Q:
The appropriate response to such vacuous displays is for people in the audience to speak out: "It's more complicated than that!" 'Why are we having this meeting? The rate of information transfer is asymptotically approaching zero,"... (с)

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is brilliant – there is no other word for it. For anyone who has suffered through more PowerPoint presentations than is reasonable to inflict on an unsuspecting universe – this will show you just how stupid the medium can make the message.

The major point of this short essay is that slideware (the proper name for PowerPoint) is generally so badly used that it makes it very hard to learn anything real from what is being presented at all. He makes this claim on the basis of the limitations of the presentation format itself. For example, the resolution is very low in PowerPoint presentations. It is hard to have anything like ‘enough’ text on the screen at any one time. So, everything ends up being written in headlines (or rather haiku) and this means that the text on the screen is ambiguous at best.

His other objection is that the bullet point format leads to remarkably poor thinking. A standard slide might have a title (one level of hierarchy), a series of dot points (a second level of hierarchy) and then some sub-dot points (a third level). Except that thinking is rarely this hierarchical (as he says, this stuff is Medieval in its structures – a place for everything and everything in its place). The problem is that these structures don’t necessarily make the sorts of sense that they might imply to the unwary. There may not actually be nearly so much order as is implied by the surface structure of the slides themselves.

Because this structure is virtually imposed by the software itself it makes it hard for those being presented to to do anything more than just accept what is being presented to them. Intellectual engagement – other than as the receiver of information – is impossible by the fact of these slides being as they are. They are linear in the worst sense and do not allow the presenter to do anything other than present. But learning and teaching is supposed to be about responding to the needs of the audience as those needs appear. Well, that is not possible. So this software is for ‘lectures’.

As I was saying about the resolution of the screen one of the read problems with the screen is that it is hard to have very many numbers on one slide. He has a fascinating table in which he shows the number of data elements presented on a standard article in various newspapers or magazines – that is, if there is a graph or a table, how many bits of data is there generally on that graph or table. He then goes though a number of books on how to use PowerPoint and finds that overall the average of data items used on their slides is 12. This is 10 – 20% of the average number of data items of any other medium. The only other time he was able to find a medium that used less data in tables was in Pravda in the last years of the Soviet Union. His point is that more data allows analysis and comparison – the only reason for showing the data in the first place.

But his analysis of the Boeing PowerPoint presentations during the in-flight time when they were trying to work out if the shuttle Columbia was going to be safe to land is a fascinating example of how this marketing tool is being misused when it is being used for anything other than the dogmatic presentation of certain facts.

I like his argument – but disagree with it in the end. I absolutely agree about bullet points and think anyone who uses them should have real bullets fired at them. However, PowerPoint can be used well and can be a remarkably good learning tool. I’m just learning how to really design slides to engage by reading a book I bought (and have recommended to everyone I can find) The Non-Designer's Presentation Book.

But the final word should go to President Lincoln.

http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/

The more I think about that -87 the more I love it.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

What’s your Microsoft rage trigger? For years mine used to be the loathsome paper-clip assistant – it seemed like a perfect symbol of Microsoft’s sneeringly obvious contempt for their users. Eventually, the continuing forced exposure to PowerPoint at my job became an irritant as well. There’d be days when I’d have to suffer through half a dozen PowerPoint presentations by my colleagues. Weeks where I’d end up having to prepare three or four slideshows of my own. This gave me plenty of opportunity to ponder just what a lame-assed piece of garbage PowerPoint was, to consider its various deficiencies and to despair at its insidious ubiquity throughout corporate America. It wasn’t so much that PowerPoint triggered explosive rage – it was more of an ongoing slow burn.

So Professor Tufte’s wicked evisceration of the program in this (very) slim pamphlet definitely struck a chord. Tufte argues that presentations developed using Powerpoint are more likely to suffer the following deficiencies:

• Inadequate resolution – not enough detail provided
• Important assumptions unstated or ambiguous
• Dumbed down content
• Complexity of arguments not adequately captured
• Data presented in a way that is unhelpful (and often misleading)

He supports his argument with three main case studies –

• the slide presentation made to NASA officials who had to make important decisions during the final flight of the space shuttle Columbia (infamously, legitimate safety concerns expressed by the engineering group did not survive the PowerPoint treatment, which sanitized them out of existence, with deadly consequences)
• what PowerPoint would make of the Gettysburg address
• the horror that can result from applying PowerPoint templates for statistical graphics to a straightforward table of relative cancer survival rates

His obvious relish at pointing out some of the worst excesses of Powerpoint in no way undermines the validity of his objections. Furthermore, as this pamphlet only runs to 28 pages, don’t expect detailed advice on how to do things better.

Nonetheless, it is fun to watch him take down PowerPoint. Given the ubiquity of dreadful PowerPoint presentations in the workplace, this pamphlet should be required remedial reading for everyone.

[Chris Hanson · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" has, at its heart, a reasonable message: Presentation software is no replacement for more technical forms of documentation and prose when making decisions. However, it suffers from two great failings: Petty hubris on the part of the author, and a lack of acknowledgment of the proper role of presentation software.

I'm not normally one to condemn a rant for failing to offer good alternatives - and this book (more pamphlet) is most definitely a rant - but one gets the impression that Tufte is as pissed off by presentation software's existence as much as its well-documented misuse. He offers good alternatives to standard bulleted slides for decision support services, but doesn't offer more than passing suggestions about what slides might be good for.

For the latter, check out "Presentation Zen" by Garr Reynolds. It'll teach you, no kidding, how to present like Steve Jobs and Reynolds is one who would know.

As for petty hubris, Tufte derides the use of clip-art, builds, transitions, as "PowerPoint Phluff." repeatedly. In exactly those terms. It's like reading circa-1998 Slashdot; I expected him to use "M$" as well. Further, again, there's no mention of alternatives or tasteful use; instead, the reader is again encouraged to produce handouts with tables of data instead of charts that can be spoken to. Statistical illiteracy is one thing, willful blindness to the reality of presentation techniques is another.

All in all, it's worth a read if you present regularly, especially in a technical setting. However, don't let it be the only work you read on the topic: "Presentation Zen" and "Slide:ology" both will teach you what to do where "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" will explain what not to do with your tools.

[Kathrina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Back in a classroom after 17 years, I felt awkward and inept concerning my ignorance of PowerPoint. I may have seen PP presentations back then, but I didn't put much thought into the software, just tried to focus on the content and let the presenter take authority for the presentation. I was never called upon to present one myself. This year my 7th grade son created a PP presentation on Burkina Faso, his first initiation into PP. Having pretty much no information on Burkina Faso going in, I found that after his presentation I still was coming up short. I understand they cook with potatoes. Well, it's 7th grade, what do I expect? The answer is, I should expect my son to come up with some valuable information and transfer it to his audience (for me, I'm a pretty blank slate here). Having some familiarity with my son, and now having some familiarity with the inherent limitations of PP, I realize that it was not entirely my son's fault that his presentation taught me something vaguely about potatoes. The format dumbs down information, fashioned more like a commercial than a teaching tool.
The irony is that I was assigned this reading in class. The concurrent class I'm in is requiring small groups to present once a week, and so far all of them have used PP to some degree. My number's up in early December, and previously I've been nervous about having to create my first PP presentation. Now, I feel somewhat relieved that my suspicions concerning its usefulness have been justified, but all the more fearful that my own conscience won't allow me to learn and use it even as its pretty much the assumed method of delivery. Can I get away with an informative handout? Should I let my group partners bear the weight of the PP part? Do I just acknowledge that it kind of sucks but do it anyway? But I hate clip art...Even more ironic, my presentation topic is "Literacy and Pedagogy". Tufte would have a field day.

[Kiri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short, quick read (more like an extended pamphlet) that rages against the PowerPoint machine. Tufte makes some good points about how blind use of a pre-set template or format can unfortunately constrain our ability to think about things, especially detailed technical issues. He shows some cringe-worthy examples and especially dives deep into a critique of the PowerPoint slides supplied during the investigation of the 2003 Columbia accident. Painful.

And yet - although it does seem clear that PowerPoint is not suited to conveying deep technical data and analysis with appropriate nuance and caveats, it's also NOT well suited for the complete sentences that he loves. In most of the talks I give, the setting is one in which the audience does not want to (and will not) read long texts off the screen. Tufte's suggestion is to eschew PowerPoint in favor of handouts, which indeed can convey much more information more compactly. I like this too, but it doesn't necessarily work for seminars or conference talks. His analysis made me reflect on why. I think most of the talks I give are more about conveying ideas. I *do* minimize text content on my slides, but that doesn't make the talk itself information-poor; I rely on my words to convey the ideas. I maintain that this is more engaging and effective than giving the audience something to read. I also rely more and more on images in my talks, because that's what a screen is really great for!

I don't think PowerPoint was ever meant to be a standalone product - he's absolutely right that it is information-poor. The practice of printing out slides and distributing them is a horrible waste of space and paper. If you're going to print something out, an outline or short list of key points (or paragraphs, if you're Tufte) seems a far better choice.

I appreciate this book for inspiring reflection and critique!

[Ben Appleby · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is trash.

Of course powerpoint has its place and some times people use it inappropriately or out of place, but people's poor use of it does not define the benefits of the software. Anything complex can be simplified, which is what ppt does. If the specific details are needed then an alternative form of communication should be used.

Poor examples are used to support points, communism banter is distracting, and pulling quotes out of context does not support any argument.

[Lumpy · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a PowerPoint hater, I love this booklet.

[Margaret Heller · Rating 4 out of 5]

So right. I hear about the extreme misuse of PowerPoint in the federal government all the time from family members employed therein. Seeing the examples in here makes it even more alarming.

I dislike cutesy slides and boring slides both. As much as possible I try to present only salient graphics and photos. This can be challenging in teaching settings when you want to present a chart, but honestly I like to show the chart once and then draw it on the board later. I think that's probably more pedagogically useful.

Though I am ok with a picture of the presenter's cat during the question period.

[Em · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish that more people read this book, because 99% of PowerPoint/slideshow presentations are terrible. A lot of the time, people don't even need slides; they just make them because they're expected, rather than to improve the presentation.

[Ashlyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some good points here against the use of PowerPoint in highly technical situations, but Tufte is pretty arrogant, flippant, and disrespectful to the point of distracting the reader away from the main topic. This piece could benefit from some concision by trimming the more pugnacious language.

[Hesam · Rating 4 out of 5]

a great work from the legendary Edward Tufte. I first heard about the book when taking a data visualization course, and of course Tufte's name will be brought up! Looking forward to reading his other books.

[Joshua · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a much more engaging read than I expected it to be. It's not just a cranky old academic complaining about style. He really rips PowerPoint apart. The in-depth analysis of the NASA incident is especially damning. PowerPoints were used in place of technical reports when they were assessing the damage to the Space Shuttle Columbia's wing. Although the evidence did not truly suggest the shuttle would be fine, the takeaway from reading the PowerPoints was that everything would be OK. Instead the shuttle overheated and blew up upon reentry.

This was especially interesting for me, having just recently finished "Understanding Media" by Marshall McLuhan. I could sense McLuhan's ideas underneath Tufte's text. Tufte argues that PowerPoint is a marketer's tool for sales pitches, which are not intended to deliver true information. They exist to manipulate the audience. And that is what has become of our scientific, academic and professional meetings. We do not deliver evidence with PowerPoint, we deliver a sales pitch. The result is poor decision making. I'd love to hear both authors thoughts about Twitter (if McLuhan was still alive). This has certainly changed my perception of PowerPoint.

[Mr. Roboto · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you are a Tufte fan and have high hopes for this short booklet, you may be disappointed. Sure, you're only paying $7 for this slim volume, but it leaves much to be desired nevertheless. After the first few pages, we get it - Tufte can't stand PowerPoint (PP) presentations (neither can I) and believes they are a terrible crutch for weak, content-lacking, dumbed-down presentations.

The means PowerPoint provides for graphing data is neither informative nor intuitive, a point Tufte drives home repeatedly in this book. As much as Tufte slams PP's data plotting software, he doesn't really provide suggestions the user can implement to improve data slides in PowerPoint presentations. Instead, Tufte suggests using more intelligent, versatile software and relying on full-text reports and handouts.

If you are seeking validation because you are the only person in your office who hates PowerPoint, this book will remind you that you have a comrade in Edward Tufte. If you are looking for practical solutions for working with PowerPoint (instead of bypassing it and coming up with a different approach as Tufte suggests), you will be disappointed.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first learned PowerPoint while I was a graduate student in the 1990s. For a few of those years I was an in-house software trainer in a mid-sized specialty food packaging company, where training managers to use Microsoft products was a big part of my job. I was pleased with my PowerPoint skills, and never thought very deeply about the questions of epistemology raised by its reductionist, linear structure. I gave a lot of thought to its aesthetics and even attended a workshop on basic graphic design that helped me to make my PowerPoint presentations pleasing, even spiffy.

At the same time I was learning every detail of Office products, I was becoming an early user of the internet, and an early developer of educational websites. When I began full-time teaching, I used PowerPoint in many of my classes, put quite a few of my own PowerPoint presentations online, and even produced PowerPoints for a major textbook publisher. In our own region, I worked with other educators to put the work of their students -- mostly in PowerPoint format -- onto web sites. This was quite helpful in making the environmental work of area middle- and high-school students more visible to their communities and policymakers.

Fortunately, this led to a collaboration with a professor in our college's art department who had actual expertise in graphic design -- my expertise having been limited to a cartography course I had passed solely on the strength of my math skills and that one afternoon workshop in brochure layout. A turning point in my self-awareness about design came when I proudly showed that professor a PowerPoint slide I had made, using a template that placed water droplets all over a background field of bright turquoise.

"That's cute," she said. "Thank you," I said. "I am being sarcastic," she said.

Soon after, she convinced me to spend most of my year's allowance of professional-development funds to attend a one-day workshop led by Edward Tufte, an emeritus professor of statistics from Yale. When I entered the ballroom of the Park Plaza hotel, I found rows of tables, with a seat for each of several hundred participants. In front of me was a glass of cold water, a small stack of books, and a map of Napolean's doomed march from Poland to Moscow and back.

For several hours -- with just a brief lunch break (lunch not included) -- the professor held forth on how to communicate visually. For his examples, he did not use slides; rather, he had memorized the page number of each map, chart, drawing or photograph he wanted to share, and invited us to follow along in his own books. In doing so, he was heeding his own advice about the comparative richness of paper versus electronic screens. Periodically, a white-gloved assistant would walk through the room, showing us original versions of many of the images we were discussing, often first editions of the works of cartographers and mathematicians of bygone centuries.

I took those books back to my office, and dip into them from time to time. His presentation stays with me, and it has made me a more careful consumer of visual information, a sharper critic of design in many settings, and -- I like to hope -- a somewhat better visual communicator.

When Professor Tufte opened the floor for questions, many of them were variations on "What do you think of PowerPoint?" and "How can I apply this in PowerPoint?"

He was as polite as he could manage, but clearly perturbed by the repeated questions about a technology that is fundamentally at odds with the principles that guide his work and teaching. It does no harm, he suggested, for about 10 percent of its users -- those who are so good at presenting information that PowerPoint will not damage their work and those who are so poor at presentations that this poor tool can help at least to make their work coherent. For the rest of us -- the 90 percent in the middle -- PowerPoint makes us less effective as communicators.

I was not surprised, therefore, to see this thoughtful essay emerge three years later. (Sorry folks, the preamble is much longer than the review this time.) In it, Tufte takes aim not at the use of PowerPoint, but at what can go wrong when used as intended. He is not gentle in his critique: he casts the software as simplistic and authoritarian, and conducive to errors that can rise to the level of genuinely catastrophic.

He does so with a bit of humor, and takes a fair number of swipes at his Harvard rivals (though of the worst abuses of PowerPoint I have seen was by a library director from his beloved Yale). Tufte describes this work as an essay rather than a book, but the slim volume contains a wealth of insight. He continues to publish the work himself, both in order to offer it at a very low price ($7 in print, $2 electronically) and to control its visual presentation.

I require the book in several of my classes, as an antidote to much of what they have been taught elsewhere. I share it as widely as I can with fellow educators, as a way to combat the dreaded "bullet course" in which classroom presentation is reduced to a series of sentence fragments on a screen. Sharing the book is also, I hope, adequate penance for my many pre-Tufte PowerPoint presentations.

[Luís Ferreira · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unapologetic bashing on the extensive use of PowerPoint as a presentation support tool, and most specifically on the way it is used to, supposedly, summarize and support decision-making processes, where in fact downplays critical and statistical reasoning, and distorts content by abbreviating information in short, imprecise and misleading statements.

While I think there is an important argument to be made, the reductio ad absurdum could have been easily traded in favor of a straightforward and constructive focus on an alternative. In some ways I feel like this book suffers from the sales pitch orientation that itself so frequently criticizes.

My notes:
Powerpoint's convenience for some presenters is costly to the content and the audience. These costs arise from the cognitive style characteristic oj the standard default PP presentation: foreshortening of evidence and thought, low spatial resolution, an intensely hierarchical single-path structure as the model for organizing every type of content, breaking up narratives and data into slides and minimal fragments, rapid temporal sequencing of thin information rather than focused spatial analysis, conspicuous chartjunk and PP Phluff, branding of slides with logotypes, a preoccupation with format not content, incompetent designs for data graphics and tables, and a smirky commercialism that turns information into a sales pitch and presenters into marketeers.

And, in presenting words, impoverished space encourages imprecise statements, slogans, abrupt and thinly-argued claims. For example, this slide from a statistics course shows a seriously incomplete cliche. In fact, probably the shortest true statement that can be made about causality and correlation is "Empirica//y observed covariation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for causality." Or perhaps "Correlation is not causation but it sure is a hint." Many true statements are too long to fit on a PP slide, but this does not mean we should abbreviate the truth to make the words fit. It means we should find a better tool to make presentations.

That the PP cognitive style mimics a software house exemplifies [follows] Conway's Law: Any organization which designs a system . . . will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.

New words:
Dingbat: a typographical device other than a letter or numeral (such as an asterisk), used to signal divisions in text or to replace letters in a euphemistically presented vulgar word.

[qiryp · Rating 3 out of 5]

It calls into question how one ought to engage with slideshows in a way that is very beneficial if you're willing to put in the effort, but Tufte spends more time complaining about the norms around PowerPoint than analyzing the actual cognitive style. There are interesting ideas, but they're buried in pages complaining about quad-nested bulletpoints, bad graphs, and bad titles. I've had the misfortune of reading many awful technical reports and documents, and I fear many of his problems are not particularly unique to slideshows.

Useful bits that I gathered or thought of:
1. The transition between slides marks a hard break in context - as such, each slide should constitute an independently chunkable bit of information.
2. Bulletpoints should only be used with a clear understanding of their logic - sets or sequences. They are too often misused, and slides need not contain any at all.
3. Slideshows are good for pointing the way, but not for rich analysis. In this, they are authoritarian, as are speeches.
4. The high distance-to-screen has resulted in a norm of slideshows being low-resolution, using big text, and relying on slogans.
5. If they must be low-resolution, slides should serve as a grounding point, not the content of the presentation. The best presenters typically speak much more than is on the slide.
6. If they can be high-resolution - e.g. online - it may be worth breaking norms.

Also, ironically, I feel this would have been very well suited to being a slideshow.

[Lizzie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A concise, biting argument against the cognitive mold that is PowerPoint, into which serious people transmitting information needed to make decisions pour complex information- and get a misshapen lump at the end. Using examples, most powerfully from NASA, Tufte demonstrates that narrative writing interspersed with “high resolution” charts and graphics is more clear and informative than the PP alternative. Tufte also sneaks in a few caustic but highly pertinent observations on the authoritarian nature of the PP presentation which prioritizes speaker comfort over clarity of transmission or audience interest.

Tufte calls for a return to the written agenda, to the technical report, and to guided discussions of high resolution aides as opposed to forced marches through linear slides and the “pre-sentence grunts” of bullet points. It’s an important critique because even in organizations that have largely resisted death-by-powerpoint, a deliberate infantilization driven by bulleted talking points and relentless simplification has taken hold. Clear thinking and clear writing are powerfully linked, as Talking Points Memo so beautifully observed the other day with reference to Grant’s memoirs. Given this, PP is the enemy of clear thinking and is poisoning policymaking from the inside out.

[Nora · Rating 5 out of 5]

First of all, it’s not possible for Tufte’s books to get anything lower than 5 from me. Second, this book is still as short as the other one (Visual and Statistical Thinking), only 30 pages, thus great to read in one go. With Tufte’s crispy yet pinpoint arguments and evidence, with the all-so-familiar Tufte-y satire, and with all the solid cases and visualizations, this small book is a pure pleasure to read. Third, of course, you can actually learn something (A LOT!) from this book. Tufte will tell you why Powerpoint slides have no power (lol) and why relying on them to present and share serious thoughts will in fact harm both the presenter and the audience. Tufte will also show you tons of informational and educational cases that help you get his point. I found myself nodding from the beginning till the end, finally understood why I hated Powerpoint slides so much ever since college, for they did not present much information and they didn’t help me to learn or think (a lot of the times I had to go back to my dorm and close read my textbooks to effectively teach myself…) If you also hate Powerpoint slides, then this book is a must-read for you. If you don’t know anything about Tufte, well, this book is also a great one for you to learn about this big name in information visualization. 10 out of 10, no doubt.

[Kai · Rating 4 out of 5]

"PP has a distinctive, definite, well-enforced, and widely-practiced cognitive style that is contrary to serious thinking. PP actively facilitates the making of lightweight presentations."

A few years of consulting taught me that delivery is more important than content. It doesn't matter what you say. Your goal, via various shapes and visuals and bullets and virtually everything Tufte advises against here, is to keep your audience in a passive trance and to not object. Hell I can't tell you how many moments I had where I didn't even know what I was trying to say -- but the medium sure packed a message in itself. It was about controlling the degree of nebulousness. Information via powerpoint is simply too bitesized, too cute, too easily agreeable - how can you not head-nod at my slides and not arrive at the conclusion I've engineered? That's what you paid us millions for, no?

[angie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Opinionated and not not-charming text.
1. I can remember only 1 really good PowerPoint presentation in my life.
- I was in the 9th grade. We all had to make a presentation about a biology (?) topic.
+ My classmate's presentation blew me away. So much that I don't remember what the hell he talked about, but how he presented.
+ His slides contains only keywords. Like flashcards. Each slides were up for about 30 seconds.
- But it is true, it's a good powerpoint because the speaker was good, and worked against the medium: his slides were all blank with the words in the middle.
- This is how I do my PowerPoint slides ever since.
2. The "magical 7 number" may be true after all now that our attention spans are all shot.
3. I wonder what's a good alternative to PowerPoint slides in a remote work environment.
4. I will always prefer a white paper.

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this booklet before realising the same content is presented in a similar form in Beautiful Evidence … anyway …

I agree there are a lot of awful powerpoint presentations out there and I agree with many of Tufte's points. The detailed NASA slide analysis is excellent. That said this is a really odd book. It's a self published booklet rant. Some of the material, as mentioned, is good, but a lot of it is weak. Like the Gettysburg address powerpoint … i'm sure this was a hilarious fw:fw:fw:fw:Funny! email to scroll through for 30s at some point, but why would you go and print the whole thing in a book?

The suggestion of swapping powerpoint for handouts to be read in advance seems wildly optimistic in most contexts (not a bad idea, but it is by no means a simple universal fix).

[Dave · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rough summary: Good content is the most important thing in a presentation. PowerPoint’s conventions and limitations cause presenters to oversimplify data and points, and make it easy to camouflage non-existent or poor content. Use PowerPoint only to show graphics which wouldn’t work well on a printout, and as a printout show the actual detailed reasoning and granular data.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant and concise analysis of the use and extreme limitations of PowerPoint. It wasn't written to suggest any in-depth alternatives, merely to point out how intellectually and cognitively limiting pp is. I think the hope was that others in the industry could devise alternatives that relationally linked data or analysis to the big text splashes providing no answers.

[Rohit Gupta · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish I could rant with such clarity. This is an amazing book on the problems of presentation style made possible by PP. If you present a lot, it could be helpful to think more about the presentations you are giving.

[E. Kahn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Powerpoint is shit, but this pamphlet does not make a very good case for why that is. Two stars, minus one star for all the weird Communism references in a work about something that is both a tool and a product of late stage Capitalism, plus one star for offering some (very thin) alternatives.

[Dana Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent pamphlet on inappropriate slideware use. If you give PowerPoint presentations, you owe it to yourself to read it.

[Mary Lauer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fabulous description of why Powerpoint is the WORST way to convey analytic results.

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Super informative, a great reminder to not let any tools dictate their output or what you create with them.

[Kendra Richards Ohmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

So this is not a book so much as it is a booklet, but it's so good for its purpose. Just read it.