Article on PowerPoint

An interesting write up Death By PowerPoint educates how PowerPoint cannot convey the correct message. Unless the message is correctly captured. The article is worth reading.

Last portion of the article is reproduced below:

NASA’s subsequent report criticised technical aspects along with human factors.  Their report mentioned an over-reliance on PowerPoint:

“The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.” 

Edward Tufte’s full report makes for fascinating reading. Since being released in 1987 PowerPoint has grown exponentially to the point where it is now estimated than thirty million PowerPoint presentations are made every day.  Yet, PowerPoint is blamed by academics for killing critical thought.  Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos has banned it from meetings.  Typing text on a screen and reading it out loud does not count as teaching.  An audience reading text off the screen does not count as learning.  Imagine if the engineers had put up a slide with just: “foam strike more than 600 times bigger than test data.”  Maybe NASA would have listened.  Maybe they wouldn’t have attempted re-entry.  Next time you’re asked to give a talk remember Columbia. Don’t just jump to your laptop and write out slides of text.  Think about your message.  Don’t let that message be lost amongst text.  Death by PowerPoint is a real thing.  Sometimes literally.