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PowerPoint Makes Your Organziation Dumb

By: posted January 7, 2007

In his brilliant Essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within, Edward Tufte explains how PowerPoint…

“…reduces the analytical quality of presentations…weakens verbal and spatial reasoning,

and almost always corrupts statistical analysis.”

…to quote his website where you can buy the Essay for only $7.

Who is Edward Tufte?  He has been called the Leonardo da Vinci of Data.  He is a professor at Yale and has taught in areas including statistics, graphic design and political economy.

An example of the power of his argument is found in the PowerPoint slides that were used to convince NASA that the Columbia Shuttle was not damaged.  Among the problems he cites are 1) the use of “bureaucratic hyper-rationalism” as one slide uses 6 levels of bullet hierarchies to display and arrange 11 statements and 2) the use of the word “significant” 5 times in one slide with meanings ranging from “detectable” to “everyone dies”.  His views have been seconded by other bodies that have analyzed the Columbia tragedy.

Check out at a sample of the Essay and please comment with your thoughts.

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  • J. Klomp

    I love Tufte! I’ve been quoting him for years….yet every moment another Powerpoint is done in our schools and teachers and administrators stand awe struck! It’s the best thing since the chalkboard! Frab— this is getting cool….we’re on the same page and you’ve been doing graduate level education and I’m in a secondary school environment….here is a case where technology might have made education worse in many classrooms. Powerpointlessness is a huge problem

  • J. Klomp

    I love Tufte! I’ve been quoting him for years….yet every moment another Powerpoint is done in our schools and teachers and administrators stand awe struck! It’s the best thing since the chalkboard! Farb— this is getting cool….we’re on the same page and you’ve been doing graduate level education and I’m in a secondary school environment….here is a case where technology might have made education worse in many classrooms. Powerpointlessness is a huge problem