PowerPoint Makes You Dumb
(New York Times,
In August, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board at NASA
released Volume 1 of its report on why the space shuttle crashed. As expected,
the ship's foam insulation was the main cause of the disaster. But the board
also fingered another unusual culprit: PowerPoint, Microsoft's well-known ''slideware'' program.
NASA, the board argued, had become too reliant on presenting
complex information via PowerPoint, instead of by means of traditional
ink-and-paper technical reports. When NASA engineers assessed possible wing
damage during the mission, they presented the findings in a confusing
PowerPoint slide -- so crammed with nested bullet points and irregular short
forms that it was nearly impossible to untangle. ''It is easy to understand how
a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it
addresses a life-threatening situation,'' the board sternly noted.
PowerPoint is the world's most popular tool for presenting
information. There are 400 million copies in circulation, and almost no
corporate decision takes place without it. But what if PowerPoint is actually
making us stupider?
This year, Edward Tufte -- the famous
theorist of information presentation -- made precisely that argument in a
blistering screed called The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. In his slim 28-page
pamphlet, Tufte claimed that Microsoft's ubiquitous
software forces people to mutilate data beyond comprehension. For example, the
low resolution of a PowerPoint slide means that it usually contains only about
40 words, or barely eight seconds of reading. PowerPoint also encourages users
to rely on bulleted lists, a ''faux analytical'' technique, Tufte
wrote, that dodges the speaker's responsibility to tie his information
together. And perhaps worst of all is how PowerPoint renders charts. Charts in
newspapers like The Wall Street Journal contain up to 120 elements on average,
allowing readers to compare large groupings of data. But, as Tufte found, PowerPoint users typically produce charts with
only 12 elements. Ultimately, Tufte concluded,
PowerPoint is infused with ''an attitude of commercialism that turns everything
into a sales pitch.''
Microsoft officials, of course, beg to differ. Simon Marks, the
product manager for PowerPoint, counters that Tufte
is a fan of ''information density,'' shoving tons of data at an audience. You
could do that with PowerPoint, he says, but it's a matter of choice. ''If
people were told they were going to have to sit through an incredibly dense
presentation,'' he adds, ''they wouldn't want it.'' And PowerPoint still has
fans in the highest corridors of power: Colin Powell used a slideware
presentation in February when he made his case to the United Nations that
Of
course, given that the weapons still haven't been found, maybe Tufte is onto something. Perhaps PowerPoint is uniquely
suited to our modern age of obfuscation -- where manipulating facts is as
important as presenting them clearly. If you have nothing to say, maybe you
need just the right tool to help you not say it. -- Clive Thompson