When PowerPoint Gets Ridiculous

I just came across this great piece by Edward Tufte on why PowerPoint is evil. He says: "At a minimum, a presentation format should do no harm. Yet the PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates and trivializes content. Thus PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play -- very loud, very slow, and very simple."

Another problem is that people seem to use it even if it isn't appropriate for the content they are presenting. I once worked for a company that produced a business plan that consisted of more than 60 PowerPoint slides. It seems to me that if you need that much room, then slides really aren't the way to go. (And if you can't sum up your business plan in fewer than 60 slides, you may want to try a rewrite, but that's beside the point.)

PowerPoint is a very useful tool and probably indisposable. Of course, we need presentation software, but do people need half the slides they include? Do they use too few, thereby stripping out important information? Do the special effects distract from whatever important points they are trying to make in the first place? In any case, its ubiquitousness has made it an easy target.

This one got sent around a few years ago, but it's still a classic -- PowerPoint taken to ridiculous extremes.

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