Tufte is tough on Microsoft PowerPoint
(Edward Tufte’s New Book: Beatuful Evidence)
If you don’t know who Edward Tufte is, you should definitely get to know him. Edward Tufte (ET) is one of best experts in the field of data and graphics display. According to Business Week, he is “the Galileo of graphics”.
Listening to ET in his one-day course in New York gave me a clear picture that he has a tough love for Microsoft PowerPoint. He suggests that there are several problems with PowerPoint and its uses to present data and graphics to audiencies in many different settings. ET suggests to use 2 page paper instead of PowerPoint. Yes, 2 page paper to replace all that jazzy flying bullet points and cool transition effects.
According to ET, 2 page paper can display the same amount of information efficiently as 50-200 PowerPoint slides. That was an eye openning discovery, because he actually shows how it can be done through some examples during his lecture. I highly recommend attending Tufte’s lectures, which takes place in different cities throughout the year in the U.S.
Read more about ET and PowerPoint issues on his web site.
