Rating: 
Summary: He's not thinking "fourth dimensionally."
Review: E.T. makes some good points. PowerPoint has its limitations, but in the right hands, a computer user, using PowerPoint and any of many other softwares, can be a very forceful and effective presenter.Say what you will against PowerPoint, some of it is well deserved and accurate, but a lot of what we call its shortcomings are really our own shortcomings in lack of imagination and creativity. In the words of Doc Brown, "Marty, you're just not thinking fourth dimensionally." If you have the use of Microsoft's products, a computer and a projector, the sky's the limit on what you can create with them and use them for. An "alt-tab" will take you to Word, which has bunches of fonts and font sizes that can be used to present detailed text, (copied and pasted) articles or excerpts and any variety of other electronic materials. A flip to Excel gives a presenter a tool for presenting spreadsheet information, formulas and calculations. In an interactive presentation (a class for example) Word makes a great electronic flipchart or whiteboard, and if convenient, you can incorporate the services of a typist to enter information for you (and spell check it too). It beats the heck out of the bad spelling and unreadable handwriting that some of us have. Excel is a great format for discussing data testing and calculations. Other software can be used to show flowcharts and every other type of electronic information. This belittlement of PowerPoint reminds me of one of my first jobs. I started working for a company in 1988 that had one lone personal computer that sat in a corner on a desk, virtually unused because no one could think of any good use for it. The boss thought that buying the computer had been a waste of money.
Rating: 
Summary: Information Guru Indicts Presentation Software
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Information Guru Indicts Presentation Software
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: It's about time.
Review: Fascinating review of the utilization of PowerPoint, its good and its bad points, mostly its bad.
Tufte cites Norvig's stunning PP of Lincoln's Gettysburg address and NASA engineers' PP of the Columbia disaster as examples of PP gone bad, and he explains why.
As anyone who has had their mind-numbed by one of 300,000 PP backgrounds or 25,000 animations will tell you, a key problem with PowerPoint boils down to this - you can either use it as a tool or as a crutch. How do you know the difference? Our guideline - if you can give your talk without PP, it's a tool. If you can't.......
Tufte excels at breaking out the good vs. the bad - there is hope for PP usage, but it has to come from the mind of the user, not the authors of the software.
Rating:
Summary: An Audience Advocate
Review: Finally, an advocate for the audience. In this 28-page essay Edward R. Tufte concludes the convenience of PowerPoint comes at a cost to content and the audience. Presentations succeed or fail based on their quality relevance and integrity of their content. At a minimum, the presentation format should not harm the content. Yet Tufte, a retired professor of design at Yale University, notes audiences absorb information at higher rates than those presented in the typical PowerPoint Presentation. For serious presentations, he says, it is useful to replace PowerPoint sides with paper handouts showing words, numbers, data, graphics and images. Presentations should reflect good teaching. Communicate core ideas with explanation, content and credible authority. There is no question that PowerPoint is an aide to those presenters who are inept or extremely disorganized. These people should learn that if they cannot summarize their point in a single sentence. If not, they should do themselves and their audiences a favor by declining the invitation to speak. For the rest, reliance on this software crutch gives the speaker a false sense of doing well and for audiences to pretend they are listening. As Tufte concludes, this little dance punctuates the question, "Why are we having this meeting?"
Rating:
Summary: An Audience Advocate
Review: Finally, an advocate for the audience. In this 28-page essay Edward R. Tufte concludes the convenience of PowerPoint comes at a cost to content and the audience. Presentations succeed or fail based on their quality relevance and integrity of their content. At a minimum, the presentation format should not harm the content. Yet Tufte, a retired professor of design at Yale University, notes audiences absorb information at higher rates than those presented in the typical PowerPoint Presentation. For serious presentations, he says, it is useful to replace PowerPoint sides with paper handouts showing words, numbers, data, graphics and images. Presentations should reflect good teaching. Communicate core ideas with explanation, content and credible authority. There is no question that PowerPoint is an aide to those presenters who are inept or extremely disorganized. These people should learn that if they cannot summarize their point in a single sentence. If not, they should do themselves and their audiences a favor by declining the invitation to speak. For the rest, reliance on this software crutch gives the speaker a false sense of doing well and for audiences to pretend they are listening. As Tufte concludes, this little dance punctuates the question, "Why are we having this meeting?"
Rating:
Summary: Lots of good counter-examples
Review: 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
Rating:
Summary: PowerPoint bad
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Judge for yourself...
Review: Reading the other reviews here, it seems clear that the folks who give this poor reviews are the same folks who love presentations with at least five colors, twenty fonts, and if possible two or three animations per slide.... I'll bet y'all just love that dancing paperclip too, don't you? Tufte's critique of Powerpoint is just an extension of what he's been saying for years: cut the crap! The more subtle point he's making is that when we try to shoehorn complex ideas into Powerpoint's straitjacket, a lot of information gets squeezed out. His analysis of the slides used by NASA engineers to discuss the possible damage to Columbia's wing is dead on. OK, maybe some of you business types are more interested in being entertained than in being informed. But you engineers out there: buy this short pamphlet and take it to heart, the man is telling us the truth. Simplify, simplify, simplify!!
Rating:
Summary: Transformed my view of presentations...
Review: This is a powerful little booklet which completely transformed the way I think about presentations. Unfortunately, it's also highly repetitive, and stunningly arrogant. The same exact point is made over, and over, and over, and over again. Why? And the arrogance displayed by the author is shocking and unnecessary. For example, the many jabs at Microsoft and other software companies. Tufte should stick to the areas he knows about, and share that knowledge, without venturing into areas he knows nothing about, such as his wide ranging tirade against software companies. It's easy to find plenty of areas in which Tufte could use some education from those very software companies - just try to book a seminar on his web site. It's the worst e-commerce flow I've ever seen. All of that notwithstanding, the booklet has still had a significant and highly positive change in the way I will think about and prepare presentations, and for that, I give it four stars.
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