Power Point Resources
#Powerpoint is Pointless - #Stop Using Powerpoint
Vint Cerf: " Power corrupts and Powerpoint corrupts absolutely! "
We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces
in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer
that was meant to portray the complexity of American military
strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti. When we
understand that slide, well have won the war, General McChrystal
dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted
in laughter.
PowerPoint: Killer App?
August 30, 2005; A17
Did
PowerPoint
make the space shuttle crash? Could it doom another mission?
Preposterous as this may sound, the ubiquitous Microsoft
"presentation software" has twice been singled out for special
criticism by task forces reviewing the space shuttle disaster.
Perhaps I've sat through too many
PowerPoint
presentations lately, but I think the trouble with these critics
is that they don't go far enough: The software may be as much of a
mind-numbing menace to those of us who intend to remain earthbound
as it is to astronauts.
PowerPoint's failings
have been outlined most vividly by Yale political scientist
Edward Tufte
, a specialist in the visual display of information. In a 2003
Wired magazine article headlined "
PowerPoint
Is Evil" and a less dramatically titled pamphlet, "The Cognitive
Style of
PowerPoint
,"
Tufte
argued that the program encourages "faux-analytical" thinking that
favors the slickly produced "sales pitch" over the sober exchange
of information.
Exhibit A in
Tufte'
s analysis is a
PowerPoint
slide presented to NASA senior managers in January 2003, while the
space shuttle Columbia was in the air and the agency was weighing
the risk posed by tile damage on the shuttle wings. Key
information was so buried and condensed in the rigid
PowerPoint
format as to be useless.
"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 Columbia Accident Investigation Board concluded,
citing Tufte's work. The board devoted a full page of its 2003
report to the issue, criticizing a space agency culture in which,
it said, "the endemic use of
PowerPoint
" substituted for rigorous technical analysis. SNIP
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