Hard to believe, but I try to be fair, ie, distribute punishment evenly . . . .
I had occasion to make a presentation in PowerPoint a week or so ago, and it occured to me that most, if not all, the criticism levelled at it by Edward Tufte and others (including your humble poster) are not necessarily the fault of PowerPoint.
While it’s abundantly true that PowerPoint or any slideware generator makes it easy to make content-free presentations, it doesn’t force anyone to do it. If you find yourself at the receiving end of a meaningless presentation, think twice before you blame the Usual Suspect.
Of course, there’s a good chance the information being presented was not conducive to the chosen medium. My own recent project is a good example. It’s a code of conduct for a public school. Now that I have thought about it in the context of this posting and the NYTimes article I commented on, slideware doesn’t make sense for this. There’s no takeaway for the students, just an hour of sitting in a dark room having slides read to them. What makes more sense is a booklet of some kind that can be referred to or at least mentioned as something they should be aware of.
I suspect there are many other opportunities to recast how information is related . . . . though I doubt there are many examples more egregious than the Columbia investigation turned up. If you followed the Challenger investigation at all, and looked at Tufte’s analysis of how meaningless, to the point of misleading, those presentations were, the fact no one learned anything that could have saved the Columbia’s crew is maddening.
<UPDATE> Tim Bray says much the same thing, but better, of course.
In another apropos but not directly related post, he writes:
If I were going to change one thing, I’d make [the US Army] use fewer acronyms, and hand anyone who tried to put more than 30 words or 3 graphics on a Powerpoint slide over to the iron wheels of military justice.