Edward Tufte, a Yale University professor and expert on visual information presentation wrote this critique of PowerPoint's role in the Columbia disaster. Tufte describes how the critical information to save the shuttle was listed as a minor (and confusing) bulleted point that was ignored when assessing the danger.
Tufte refers to a series of slides as a “PowerPoint festival of bureaucratic hyper-rationalism, [where] six different levels of hierarchy are used to display, classify and arrange 11 phrases.” This level of hierarchy is rediculous. There is just no need for six levels of organization when there are only 11 pieces of information as it only makes the slides hard to understand.
This over-organized structure is repeated throughout the presentation, Tufte writes,
"Every single text-slide uses bullet-outlines with four to six levels of hierarchy. Then another multi-level list, another bureaucracy of bullets starts afresh for a new slide. 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."
Tufte also dives into the language used in the presentation, stating that generalized, polished words are used recklessly and without regard to what they mean. Consider this slide:
“The vigorous, vaguely quantitative words ‘significant’ and ‘significantly’ are used five times on this slide, with meanings ranging from ‘detectable in a perhaps irrelevant case study’ to ‘an amount of damage so that everyone dies.’”
This inability to use information from PowerPoint may be indicative of a general shortcoming of the software. The standardization possible with the utility has led to a culture where the presentation is more important than the content contained within, leading to boredom, confusion and ineffective information dissemination.
Ruth Marcus states that the “PowerPointing of the planet…tends to flatten the most complex, subtle, even beautiful ideas into tedious, bullet-pointed bureaucratese.” This notion was excellently reflected in this parody of the Gettysburg Address as a PowerPoint presentation.
In an article Tufte wrote for Wired, he stated the main problem with PowerPoint is that it "elevates format over content" and creates a structure that is not conducive to absorbing information effectively.
"In a business setting, a PowerPoint slide typically shows 40 words, which is about eight seconds' worth of silent reading material. With so little information per slide, many, many slides are needed. Audiences consequently endure a relentless sequentiality, one damn slide after another. When information is stacked in time, it is difficult to understand context and evaluate relationships. Visual reasoning usually works more effectively when relevant information is shown side by side. Often, the more intense the detail, the greater the clarity and understanding. This is especially so for statistical data, where the fundamental analytical act is to make comparisons," Tufte wrote.
Tufte’s critique brings the PowerPoint’s shortcomings to light. While this does not mean the beginning of the end for the application, it further shows the importance of creating quality PowerPoint presentations that convey information effectively.
