I have been annoyed by PowerPoint for a while now which made me pretty interested in reading Edward R. Tufte’s self-publication “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint”. This paper basically slams PP for oversimplifying and distorting information. There was a joke e-mail going around the Internet few months back about someone who took this paper and summarised it in a PP presentation.

If there ever was a collective of bad presenters then grad students take the cake. It is fair to say that I have sat through a multitude of incomprehensible presentations. In a sense PowerPoint helps you discern what people are talking about. However, I often don’t want to read the slide and listen to the presenter at the same time. This is especially true if the presenter is mumbling. My worst pet peeve about PP, however, is when I pull out slides from a presentation a month later (or even later the same day) and try to figure out what the presenter meant to say.

This paper was ‘preaching to converted’ as far as I go. There are a lot of very good points in this paper. Examination of NASA presentations on which the decision to not worry about Columbia shuttle was based is interesting. There is a funny mock PP presentation of the Gettysburg Address. However, for some points Tufte went a bit far. I don’t really follow the connection between PP style and authority in the Roman Empire, but whatever. To add to complaints I don’t like his solution to the problem of presenting the information in other ways. While handing out printed charts in a meeting at work is a good method, doing the same in class is not convenient or socially acceptable. Not to mention handouts that you will not be keeping for further reference are even more annoying than bad PP presentations.

Overall I enjoyed reading this paper and I might check out some of Tufte’s other work, however, it did not knock my socks off.