PowerPoint: Killer App?

For the most part, I despise PowerPoint. At face value, there is nothing wrong with it but its use in my opinion has gotten way out of hand. I have fought the battle opting to present point papers whenever I could get away with it but all too often it seems the requirement for making significant proposals is a "brief"with simplistic bullets or copious amounts of information crowded onto one slide at 8 point font. Rather silly I think. This opinion piece sums up my views on our fascination with slide making.

Did PowerPoint make the space shuttle crash? Could it doom another mission? Preposterous as this may sound, the ubiquitous Microsoft "presentation software" has twice been singled out for special criticism by task forces reviewing the space shuttle disaster.

Perhaps I've sat through too many PowerPoint presentations lately, but I think the trouble with these critics is that they don't go far enough: The software may be as much of a mind-numbing menace to those of us who intend to remain earthbound as it is to astronauts.

PowerPoint's failings have been outlined most vividly by Yale political scientist Edward Tufte, a specialist in the visual display of information. In a 2003 Wired magazine article headlined "PowerPoint Is Evil" and a less dramatically titled pamphlet, "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint," Tufte argued that the program encourages "faux-analytical" thinking that favors the slickly produced "sales pitch" over the sober exchange of information.