Revisiting Death By PowerPoint

I had a Google drive-by (n. an accidental stumbling onto an interesting link while searching for a completely unrelated topic) on Edward Tufte’s classic article in Wired Magazine. PowerPoint Is Evil censures slideware, slideware users, schools, businesses, Microsoft, and anyone with an association to PowerPoint or like software. It’s outrageously funny and uncannily profound.

“PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector. But rather than supplementing a presentation, it has become a substitute for it. Such misuse ignores the most important rule of speaking: Respect your audience.”

Tufte isn’t a PowerPoint hater… he’s a pragmatist. Slideware has been around for a couple of decades, but it can seem like centuriesif you’ve labored through a bad PowerPoint presentation(1).

If the Wired feature piques your interest, check out Tufte’s blog thread entitled PowerPoint Does Rocket Science—and Better Techniques for Technical Reports. Or Google the phrase ‘Death By Powerpoint’. And if you really want to dig deep into the topic, pick up Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery by Garr Reynolds.

1. No one ever says, “…gave a presentation and used PowerPoint.” We all say, “… gave a PowerPoint presentation.”

►