Having gone on record against the narrative-killing malevolence of PowerPoint (“Unsure? Tell a story . . .”), I was pleased to see that the most popular story in The New York Times this week documents military commanders’ disgust with the fancy slide show. But we haters have little impact: recently someone asked me if I could give a presentation in PowerPoint on a magazine article I wrote. No and no! The Times‘ April 26 story by Elisabeth Bumiller refers to …
I read my first criticism of PowerPoint before I’d consciously seen many presentations. It probably flowed from Edward Tufte, author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, whose essays “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint” and “PowerPoint is Evil” damn it as cognitive novacaine. Citing Tufte, the board that investigated the space shuttle Columbia disaster implicated the software, used during the crisis, for what was allegedly a flawed response to the ship’s danger. (See “PowerPoint, Killer App” by Ruth Marcus in …