Edward Tufte wrote a groundbreaking book called the Visual Display of Quantitative Information. It had a real influence on how a bunch of computer graphing works today - including in Excel. He now has a new essay, The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint, critiquing how my most loved form of expression is wrecking the way people communicate:
"Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis."
Maybe he's right. Well it only costs 7 bucks to find out. Handy order form right on the site.
Blaming PowerPoint for bad presentations is a little like blaming Word for not creating Shakespeare. Or MovableType for a boring blog.
The darn thing is a tool and you can really misuse it. No doubt about it. Kind of amazing how widely used the tool is though. Mentioned in Powell's book on his career in the military, in the Nasa analysis and of course essentially every school in America now uses for everything.
Posted by: Rich Tong on August 27, 2003 09:11 PM