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To hear Edward
Tufte tell it, PowerPoint is a killer app that actually kills.
Truly.
He points to a poorly done PowerPoint presentation as a cause for
the space shuttle Columbia disaster. An author and former
Yale professor, Tufte argues that the imprecise nature of
PowerPoint glossed over the true cause of the disaster. The presenters who analyzed the foam debris that caused
the disaster, Tufte claims, were too imprecise by virtue of the use
of PowerPoint.
If you’d like to
hear Tufte rail against PowerPoint on a recent edition of NPR
click here.
And we’re no lovers
of PowerPoint here at Speechworks.
But Tufte’s claims
probably apply best to presentations of highly technical information
in visual form.
Looking at his
website, you’ll see that the visuals he loves are often
highly complicated themselves, though perhaps they’re accurate.
One has to wonder
whether the average business person can really use his ideas. Or
whether we’re just supposed to send in our money and buy his
beautiful graphs and illustrations, frame them, and put them on our
walls.
Our Beef with PowerPoint
At Speechworks, our
complaint with PowerPoint is different than Tufte’s complaint. We
think that PowerPoint is a perfectly fine program. It's just used improperly. Most people use it as a
presentation creation tool when it’s actually a tool to
illustrate presentations.
To create a
presentation, you should first decide what are your two or three
core messages. Then you should fill out what you’re going to say to
illustrate those messages. Then you should decide how you’re going
to illustrate those points.
Instead, people
create their presentations by opening up PowerPoint and relying on
the templates that the program provides. As a result, most
PowerPoint presentations are
painful outlines with lots of bullet points.
So,
if you’re watching a bad presentation, you don’t blame
PowerPoint. Blame the presenter.
At Speechworks we
help our clients learn how to communicate in a way that connects and
persuades. If you’re interested in becoming a great communicator
give us a call at 404-266-0888 or check out our website at
www.speechworks.net. |
