IT 5130: PowerPoint is Evil…Tufte Needs a Nap!

After reading the Tufte article, I came to a startling conclusion:

Mr. Tufte obviously fronted money for Bill Gates when he was starting Microsoft, but sold out early because he didn’t believe the venture would fly. Now, he’s got sour grapes.

In Scott Rosenberg’s article “The Data Artist” (Salon, March 1997), he says, “It could be, too, that the big publishers unfairly pegged Tufte as a bit of a crank. His writing sometimes exhibits a curled-lip testiness toward its targets, and he's unafraid to wield the knife of the polemical critic.”
Ya think?!?

Seriously…I get what Tufte is saying. Many presenters across numerous fields rely too much on PowerPoint and its ability to make creating presentation materials *easy*, like a WYSIWYG editor. PowerPoint is not a suitable medium for presenting scientific and technical material. I *get* it.

But what about the responsibility of the presenter? Why rely on the templates from PowerPoint? You can be quite creative using the blank presentation model. It’s the designer’s ability and responsibility to coherently design and present their information using the PowerPoint medium, right?

Seriously, we’re looking at slideshows that *win awards*…doesn’t that say that designers can and do have a clue?

Regarding the NASA example, the engineers could have fine-tuned and presented their information in a more coherent manner. Tufte’s graphic where he "cleaned up the engineers’ information" proves that. It’s not PowerPoint’s fault that they chose not to do so. It actually sounds more like the engineers deliberately tried to minimize the bad news by hiding it in the lower hierarchy of the slides. That’s akin to criminal, in my mind.

BTW: I looked up Tufte’s term “Projector Operating System”. I could only find it five pages deep on Google, in reference to a specific projector, “In Focus multimedia projector operating system LP 740TM”. It was a manual for a projector.

That’s why I sincerely think Tufte’s term “Projector Operating System” is a tongue-in-cheek method for Tufte to call PowerPoint and Microsoft a “POS”. (See Scott Reosenberg’s reference above for Tufte's attitude.)

For a condensed version of this material, check out Tufte’s “PowerPoint is Evil” article in Wired magazine. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html It condenses the material of our course article, makes most of the same points but omits the NASA information.