PowerPoint Is Evil

Power
Corrupts.                                                                                         Issue 11.09 | September
2003

PowerPoint Corrupts
Absolutely.

By Edward Tufte

Genevieve
Liang

Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug
that promised to make us beautiful but didn't. Instead the drug had frequent,
serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted
time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication. These side
effects would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall.

Yet slideware -computer
programs for presentations -is everywhere: in corporate America, in
government bureaucracies, even in our schools. Several hundred million copies
of Microsoft PowerPoint are churning out trillions of slides each year. Slideware may help speakers outline their talks, but
convenience for the speaker can be punishing to both content and audience. The
standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an
attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.

Of course, data-driven meetings are nothing new. Years before today's slideware,
presentations at companies such as IBM and in the military used bullet lists
shown by overhead projectors. But the format has become ubiquitous under
PowerPoint, which was created in 1984 and later acquired by Microsoft.
PowerPoint's pushy style seeks to set up a speaker's dominance over the
audience. The speaker, after all, is making power points with bullets to
followers. Could any metaphor be worse? Voicemail menu
systems? Billboards? Television?
Stalin?

AP/Wide
World Photos

Tufte satirizes the totalitarian impact of
presentation slideware.

Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint
cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using
sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials.
Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in
student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a
piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides -a
total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work.
Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days
and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining
something.

In a business setting, a PowerPoint slide typically shows
40 words, which is about eight seconds' worth of silent reading material. With
so little information per slide, many, many slides are needed. Audiences
consequently endure a relentless sequentiality, one
damn slide after another. When information is stacked in time, it is difficult
to understand context and evaluate relationships. Visual reasoning usually
works more effectively when relevant information is shown side by side. Often, the more intense the detail, the greater the clarity and
understanding. This is especially so for statistical data, where the
fundamental analytical act is to make comparisons.

GOOD

Graphics
Press

A
traditional table: rich, informative, clear.

BAD

Graphics
Press

PowerPoint chartjunk: smarmy, chaotic, incoherent.

Consider an important and intriguing table of survival
rates for those with cancer relative to those without cancer for the same time
period. Some 196 numbers and 57 words describe survival rates and their
standard errors for 24 cancers.

Applying the PowerPoint templates to this nice,
straightforward table yields an analytical disaster. The data explodes into six
separate chaotic slides, consuming 2.9 times the area of the table. Everything
is wrong with these smarmy, incoherent graphs: the encoded legends, the
meaningless color, the logo-type branding. They are uncomparative,
indifferent to content and evidence, and so data-starved as to be almost
pointless. Chartjunk is a clear sign of statistical
stupidity. Poking a finger into the eye of thought, these data graphics would
turn into a nasty travesty if used for a serious purpose, such as helping
cancer patients assess their survival chances. To sell a product that messes up
data with such systematic intensity, Microsoft abandons any pretense of
statistical integrity and reasoning.

Presentations largely stand or fall on the quality,
relevance, and integrity of the content. If your numbers are boring, then
you've got the wrong numbers. If your words or images are not on point, making
them dance in color won't make them relevant. Audience boredom is usually a
content failure, not a decoration failure.

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.

The practical conclusions are clear. PowerPoint is a
competent slide manager and projector. But rather than supplementing a
presentation, it has become a substitute for it. Such misuse ignores the most
important rule of speaking: Respect your audience.

Edward R. Tufte
is professor emeritus of political science, computer science and statistics,
and graphic design at Yale. His new
monograph, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, is available from Graphics Press (www.edwardtufte.com).