I’m a fan of Edward Tufte, the guru of charts, but I’m still not sure about his view of PowerPoint. The New York Times Magazine has another article on his recent polemic against Microsoft’s presentation software. Tufte claimed, as the NYT piece says, that Microsoft’s ubiquitous software forces people to mutilate data beyond comprehension, infusing PowerPoint with ”an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.”
Not that Microsoft gets it either: NYT quotes Simon Marks, the product manager for PowerPoint, as saying that the opposite is ‘data density’, shoving tons of data at an audience. You could do that with PowerPoint, he says, but it’s a matter of choice. ”If people were told they were going to have to sit through an incredibly dense presentation,” he adds, ”they wouldn’t want it.”
NYT’s conclusion: If you have nothing to say, maybe you need just the right tool to help you not say it.
And afther the lecture (note’s not necessary) you become a summarize, containing prints of the pps.
So dumb.