n August, the Columbia Accident
Investigation Board at NASA released Volume 1 of its report on why
the space shuttle crashed. As expected, the ship's foam insulation
was the main cause of the disaster. But the board also fingered
another unusual culprit: PowerPoint, Microsoft's well-known
''slideware'' program.
NASA, the board argued, had become too reliant on presenting
complex information via PowerPoint, instead of by means of
traditional ink-and-paper technical reports. When NASA engineers
assessed possible wing damage during the mission, they presented the
findings in a confusing PowerPoint slide -- so crammed with nested
bullet points and irregular short forms that it was nearly
impossible to untangle. ''It is easy to understand how a senior
manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it
addresses a life-threatening situation,'' the board sternly noted.
PowerPoint is the world's most popular tool for presenting
information. There are 400 million copies in circulation, and almost
no corporate decision takes place without it. But what if PowerPoint
is actually making us stupider?
This year, Edward Tufte -- the famous theorist of information
presentation -- made precisely that argument in a blistering screed
called The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. In his slim 28-page
pamphlet, Tufte claimed that Microsoft's ubiquitous software forces
people to mutilate data beyond comprehension. For example, the low
resolution of a PowerPoint slide means that it usually contains only
about 40 words, or barely eight seconds of reading. PowerPoint also
encourages users to rely on bulleted lists, a ''faux analytical''
technique, Tufte wrote, that dodges the speaker's responsibility to
tie his information together. And perhaps worst of all is how
PowerPoint renders charts. Charts in newspapers like The Wall Street
Journal contain up to 120 elements on average, allowing readers to
compare large groupings of data. But, as Tufte found, PowerPoint
users typically produce charts with only 12 elements. Ultimately,
Tufte concluded, PowerPoint is infused with ''an attitude of
commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.''
Microsoft officials, of course, beg to differ. Simon Marks, the
product manager for PowerPoint, counters that Tufte is a fan of
''information density,'' shoving tons of data at an audience. You
could do that with PowerPoint, he says, but it's a matter of choice.
''If people were told they were going to have to sit through an
incredibly dense presentation,'' he adds, ''they wouldn't want it.''
And PowerPoint still has fans in the highest corridors of power:
Colin Powell used a slideware presentation in February when he made
his case to the United Nations that Iraq possessed weapons of mass
destruction.
Of course, given that the weapons still haven't been found, maybe
Tufte is onto something. Perhaps PowerPoint is uniquely suited to
our modern age of obfuscation -- where manipulating facts is as
important as presenting them clearly. If you have nothing to say,
maybe you need just the right tool to help you not say it.