Tag Archives: Edward Tufte

Serious problems require a serious tool: written reports. For nearly all engineering and scientific communication, instead of PowerPoint, the presentation and reporting software should be a word-processing program capable of capturing, editing and publishing text, tables, data graphics, images and scientific notation. Replacing PowerPoint with Microsoft Word (or, better, a tool with non-proprietary universal formats) will make presentations and their audiences smarter.

That’s our old friend Edward Tufte again, in PowerPoint Does Rocket Science–and Better Techniques for Technical Reports. I know that I’m beating up PowerPoint this week, but I wanted that quote because mentions “non-proprietary universal formats” – and that means open source, badda-bing.

This all started because NATO use PowerPoint far too much. Ironically they then post all the PowerPoint slides on a super-duper high-security intranet, the sort of place where information goes to die, although at least they’re thorough and consistent about it. However it just doesn’t seem to meet the needs of decision-making, particularly in complex situations. David Byrne notwithstanding, most people realise that PowerPoint doesn’t help them much, and in some cases hinders them.¹

PowerPoint has its place, but it’s become like a weed that stifles the growth of other presentation tools. I was only partly joking when I talked about a PowerPoint vaccine to inoculate organisations against its further spread – perhaps organisations could declare a “No PowerPoint Day” (week? month? year?) and ask employees to come up with alternative ways of delivering their message?

1. I once had to develop a slide show 30 minutes before giving a speech because the conference organizers simply couldn’t conceive of a presentation without PowerPoint and refused to let me take the podium without a slide show. Needless to say, the slide show ended halfway through the actual talk, and thus I maintained the delicate balance between the principled and the practical. [↩]

Knock, knock, knocking PowerPoint, all week long.

Anybody who cares about “our” kind of information management should read Edward Tufte’s classic The Visual Display of Quantitive Information. Yes, I know it’s expensive – get your gran to buy it you for Christmas or something. What I didn’t know is that Tufte also wrote a short essay called The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint – which at $7 for 32 pages frankly isn’t worth your gran’s pension money (get her to buy you Unknown Soldier instead) – which lays out exactly what is wrong with PowerPoint:

How is it that each elaborate architecture of thought always fits exactly on one slide? The rigid slide-by-slide hierarchies, indifferent to content, slice and  dice the evidence into arbitrary compartments, producing an anti-narrative with choppy continuity… The format reflects a common conceptual error in analytic design: information architectures mimic the hierarchical structure of large bureaucracies pitching the information.

Did everybody at the back hear that? I’ll repeat it in bold: The format reflects a common conceptual error in analytic design: information architectures mimic the hierarchical structure of large bureaucracies pitching the information. Now as you all know, my own preference is that information architecture and the associated technology should bind to existing organisational processes – so does that mean that I disagree with Tufte?

Absolutely not, because organisational processes don’t usually match up with organisational structures, and information flow in particular looks nothing like the organigram. However this creates a serious design problem when you try to fit the two together, which is why we end up with PowerPoint slides that, by bearing a cosmetic resemblance to the organisational structure, can fool everybody into thinking they represent the way the organisation thinks.