By SCOTT DEWING
Published: December 2009

THOSE WHO USE PowerPoint to give presentations usually have no power and no point.

Whether or not that glib axiom holds true for all presenters, I think we’ve probably all had at least one opportunity to suffer through a presentation in which the presenter deftly used PowerPoint to turn what might have been an interesting talk into an hour-long yawn-fest.

Students certainly have been bludgeoned by teachers trying to beat information into them with the PowerPoint club, which, when taken to its extreme, is about as effective at piquing a student’s intellectual curiosity as a full frontal lobotomy.

Business people daily suffer through PowerPoint presentations. Some of these are in-person presentations given in spacious conference rooms where everyone sits around a big shiny table doodling on the slide handouts given to them at the beginning of the presentation. The handouts have the exact, bulleted information that is up on the screen. But whether it’s in the boardroom or the classroom, most presentations that use PowerPoint are worse off because of it.

That’s not to say that there’s not someone out there who hasn’t given a presentation that was made better by PowerPoint. I’m sure there is. I’ve just never been lucky enough to meet him or her. This, of course, includes me: I’ve contributed my fair share of poor presentations that were borified by the use of PowerPoint.

This leaves me wondering: Why do most PowerPoint presentations suck? Is the problem with PowerPoint, the presenter, or both?

These are questions that statistician and information design guru Edward Tufte addresses in his book Beautiful Evidence.

“PowerPoint comes with a big attitude,” says Tufte. “With little information per slide, many many slides are needed. Audiences endure a relentless sequentiality, one damn slide after another.”

One of the major problems with PowerPoint, argues Tufte, is its cognitive style, the way in which the very hierarchical structure of the software shoe-horns every type of content into the same narrow sequencing of information and a narrative that is, quite literally, riddled with bullet points.

According to Tufte, this should come as no surprise.

“The metaphor of PowerPoint is the software corporation itself,” he says. “To describe a software [company] is to describe the PP cognitive style: a big bureaucracy engaged in computer programming (deep hierarchical structures, relentlessly sequential, nested, one-short-line-at-a-time) and in marketing (advocacy not analysis, more style than substance, misdirection, slogan thinking, fast pace, branding, exaggerated claims, marketplace ethics).”

Not to pick on PowerPoint’s creator, but Tufte’s description pretty much describes Microsoft: a big bureaucracy engaged in the creation and marketing of software.

And could PowerPoint have turned out any other way? According to pioneering computer scientist Melvin Conway, no.

“Organizations that design systems,” wrote Conway in the April 1968 issue of Datamation magazine, “are constrained to produce systems which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” This statement is commonly referred to as Conway’s Law.

I’ve been working with PowerPoint for 17 years and counting now. At one point, I must confess, I was a cog in Microsoft’s cognitive wheel, working directly on producing the end-user documentation for PowerPoint back in the days when user documentation in the form of books were bundled with the installation disks.

The user guides that I helped produce were hierarchical tomes that led the user through every menu, function, and feature of the software. Step-by-step instructions were accompanied by screenshots to demonstrate everything that you could do with PowerPoint. What these guides didn’t address, however, was what constituted an effective presentation and in which situations a PowerPoint presentation was even applicable. Of course, the marketeers would have you believe that the brilliance of the software is what made your presentation “effective” and that every presentation would somehow be made better by PowerPoint.

Of course, that’s just not the case. “Serious problems require a serious tool,” says Tufte. “For nearly all engineering and scientific communication, instead of PowerPoint, the presentation and reporting software should be a word-processing program.”

(Hey, you mean like Microsoft Word?)

According to Tufte, the cognitive style of PowerPoint contributed to errors in judgement that resulted in the tragic death of the 7 astronauts aboard the space-shuttle Columbia in 2003. During liftoff, a piece of foam broke off from the liquid fuel tank and hit the shuttle’s left wing at a high enough velocity to make a small hole in the wing’s thermal protection. The Columbia orbited Earth for 2 weeks then burned up during re-entry because of the damage that had been done to the wing during liftoff.

That’s what we know now after an exhaustive study and lengthy report by NASA. But during the two weeks that the Columbia was in orbit, rocket scientists were scrambling to try and figure out and assess the nature and extent of the damage to the wing during liftoff and determine the level of threat during re-entry.

PowerPoint had become the norm for giving presentations at NASA and the analysis and conclusions regarding the fate of Columbia were transformed into a “relentless sequentiality” of digital slides.

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report concluded, “As information gets passed up an organization hierarchy…key explanations and supporting information are filtered out. In this context, 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 views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.”

That’s not to say that PowerPoint was single-handedly responsible for the Columbia tragedy; rather, it’s to illustrate the importance of clear communication, which should be the purpose of any presentation, and the danger that can result when, as media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously put it, “the medium is the message”.