Next slide, please. Finally, insiders are noticing that a particular emperor of the organizational world has no clothes. Business guru Thomas A. Stewart says that
Friends Don't Let Friends Use PowerPoint.Never put more than three bullet points on a PowerPoint slide, experts say. It confuses people. Keep it simple. You know, the way life is. In "The American Scholar," Emerson warned against the tendency to believe something just because it is written down. How much greater the danger when it is also boiled down.
Edward Tufte, the eminence gris of information design, agrees. In fact, Tufte has written
a polemic on the subject.In the 24-page booklet, Tufte gallops with apparent glee through numerous examples of bad PowerPoint. He tears apart "the dreaded build sequence" (a series of slides, each of which reveals a single new line of text). He writes that Harvard School of Public Health templates for presentations "emulate the format of reading primers for six-year-olds," offering a side-by-side of the Harvard slides and just such a primer to prove his point.
Tufte is not merely having fun here. In many companies, important decisions come out of meetings in which PowerPoint slides define the agenda. If the method for making the decisions is childish, what sort of decisions do you think will come out of that method?
Peter Norvig decided to test this assertion by imagining
what Abraham Lincoln might have come up with if he had Power Point, a laptop, and a computer projection screen at Gettysburg. The results are
hilarious and disturbing.
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