Kevin pointed me to an article on Wired¹ by well-known visual presentation guru Edward Tufte, with the awesome title "PowerPoint Is Evil".

Tufte is probably best known for his book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Not the easiest read (ironically) but well worth it if you are interested in learning how to improve your use of visuals in your writing or presentations.

The Wired article is excellent and Tufte makes his case clearly, essentially pointing out how we are now in a situation where the tail is wagging the dog. This is perhaps best summed up by his presentation equivalent of the Hypocratic Oath:

"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."

Tufte has been railing on PowerPoint for years but for some reason has not gotten much mainstream attention on what to many of us is quite obvious - PowerPoint has lowered the quality of presentations, not raised it. Now I don”t know any of the folks who created PowerPoint, but I am sure they are well-intentioned, smart and fun to have at parties. I am equally sure that the situation we now find ourselves in was in fact the opposite of their intention.

It reminds me of the early days of desktop publishing where suddenly people were able to create their own company newsletter, flyers and what have you. This was incredibly empowering, taking something that had been the purview of typographers and graphic designers and putting it into the hands of mere mortals. Yet in the beginning, while the quantity of content produced soared, the quality followed an equally sloped but opposite trend line.

Initially the speed, flexibility and economics of DTP far outweighed any quality issues but over time two related things happened. First, readers began to focus more on the quality of the layout. They may not have had the words to articulate the issue with the company newsletter in terms of use of white space, serifs versus san-serifs and and so on, but the design still left an overall impression that was sub-par. It doesn”t take a professional typographer to figure out that cramming 40 different typefaces on to the same page isn’t going to look quite right. Perhaps more importantly, it distracts from the message.

The second thing that occurred however was that people producing these newsletters, once they got comfortable with the basic use of the tools, began to devote more time to the visuals of the output. Just like any new skill or tool, first we learn the basics of how to use it, then we refine our use of it. One of the best ways to do this is, if you will, by osmosis. By looking at examples produced by others and consciously deciding what we like and what we don’t, we tend to both develop our own style and also acquire more knowledge of what works well and what does not.

In the case of PowerPoint² however this has, by and large, not happened. I believe this is largely an issue of motivation. While many people out there enjoy the nuances of creating and delivering a great presentation (in whatever form), for most folks it is simply an obligation that comes along occasionally as part of their job. How many people do you know who say "I’ve got to make a presentation to management next Monday. Fantastic! This news has brought a little ray of sunshine to my day." (as opposed to "Oh, crap, there goes my weekend.")

Given that situation, it is not surprising, or indeed even unreasonable, that most people will take the quickest and easiest path to completing the task. Looking to the arsenal of tools with which your employer endows you, your main decision is likely to be which of the Microsoft Office applications you will use. Need I say more.

Presentation Zen recently had a great article on another very common (mis)use of PowerPoint, using it to generate a printed report, with some real-world examples that, in this case, potentially have some extremely serious consequences. Garr also references Tufte (because he is, you know, the man on this stuff)

And to top it all off, I came across an article in The Sydney Morning Herald on a discovery by researchers that the human brain can process information very well if it is received in either written or verbal form but runs into trouble if it is trying to do both at the same time. While this all makes sense, the author makes a leap that, much as I would love to believe it is true, only makes sense in the absence of, well, the real world:

“The Australian researchers who made the findings may have pronounced the death of the PowerPoint presentation.”

The problem here of course, as stated above, is that using PowerPoint is likely to continue to be the easiest and quickest route for most people. and they don’t really care about how well you remember it or even if you had a good time. They just want to get the meeting over and go play with their kid, ski, watch football or any of the thousands of other things that are more important to them than giving this fricking presentation.

For those of us that need to give presentations for a living and/or just enjoy the whole art of it, we should pay attention to Tufte and others like him and try to improve our craft. For everyone else, maybe we can at least get them to read the Tufte article and also Guy Kawasaki’s post on The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint.

¹ Remind me again why I bother paying for a subscription to Wired when I can read any of the decent articles online for free, and more importantly not have to wade through the mess of drug-induced layout and typography that is so last century?

² Both Tufte and I are picking on PowerPoint here because, well, its a Microsoft product and who doesn’t love a good Microsoft bashing session? Of course it is equally true of other similar tools such as OpenOffice or, dare I risk the wrath of my fellow Macheads by saying so, Keynote. Keynote is my preferred tool of the bunch and it gives you a better interface, better templates and better visuals, but the quality of your work, as Tufte teaches us, shouldn’t depend on any of that or you are already sunk. And I hear the new visual engine in PowerPoint 2007 is great but I haven’t had a chance to try it yet.