CALL ME CERTIFIABLE: How Powerpoint Is Like Melvin

How PowerPoint Is Like Melvin

Why some things--and people--are just unlikable. By Em C. Pea

Back when Auntie Em was just a wee sprout in Public School 102, there was a boy named Melvin in the next class. Melvin was the sort of boy that everyone just loved to notice: nerdy, stammering, dressed in oddly colored clothing and with awkward posture. Being children, of course, we picked on him without a second thought. I've often wondered what happened to Melvin. These days, I suspect that one of the Microsoft development teams knows just how he felt, because PowerPoint is rapidly becoming the Melvin of Microsoft.

For some reason, PowerPoint has become the application that those who don't use it love to hate. Leading the charge is information-design maven Edward Tufte, who penned an essay titled, "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint." He announces that the standard PowerPoint templates "usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis." For a mere $7, you can buy the rest of his critique at https://www.edwardtufte.com .

Tufte is not alone in this loathing for PowerPoint. "The New York Times" picked up on Tufte's ideas with an article titled, “PowerPoint Makes You Dumb." You'll find others on the Web referring to PowerPoint as "evil," "soulless" or "considered harmful."

There are bright spots in the online world of PowerPoint criticism, of course. The classic "Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation" (http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/ ) is one of the funniest things online -- and much more subtle than more recent criticism. Then there’s Aaron Swartz’s presentation of the Tufte essay in PowerPoint format (http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000931 ). But overall, PowerPoint is still definitely in Melvin territory.

Why does PowerPoint, of all the innocuous applications in the world, collect all these naysayers? Contrary to the Times, PowerPoint doesn't really force you to be dumb. Yes, you can create stultifying presentations, but you can also use Word to create inane brochures -- and we're not treated to a barrage of warnings about Word being the spawn of the devil. Contrariwise, anyone who's been to a really good seminar has probably seen PowerPoint used effectively to enhance the work of an excellent speaker. There just seems to be something about yellow text and bullet points on a deep blue background that affects pundits in all the wrong ways.

It seems to me that a large part of the problem is simply PowerPoint's success. Want to fire 500 people? Put the numbers in a PowerPoint presentation and

CIS 50 – PowerPoint Page: 1 show them to senior management. Time to review the dismal financials from last quarter? There they are on the screen. Just as Pavlov's dogs salivated when he rang a bell, even though the bell really had nothing to do with the food, so do today's high-tech workers viscerally associate PowerPoint with bad news delivered via bullet points and stunning colors.

This points to a cure, of course: The PowerPoint team should start a concerted drive to use the tool for good news as well as bad. Announce the company picnic, complete with a paid day off, by giving a slide show in the corporate auditorium. Deliver news of year-end bonuses to the team with a bullet-point list of what they've done right. Heck, the product team could even help out here, by including a few new templates tastefully decorated with happy faces and party streamers.

For that matter, what about a PowerPoint design certification? If the problem is not the tool but its misuse (as I firmly believe), perhaps there just aren't enough people trained to create innovative and eye-catching presentations. Surely Microsoft could put together some compelling training and an exam, and create a small army of PowerPoint MCPs to spread the good word.

Oh, and Melvin? If you're out there, drop me an e-mail. I figure by now you're probably CIO of some Fortune 500 company and getting your just revenge by living well.

Are you a happy PowerPoint user? Or are you trying to convince your boss to declare the company a PowerPoint-free zone?

CIS 50 – PowerPoint Page: 2 POWERPOINT MAKES YOU DUMB

This year, Edward Tufte -- the famous theorist of information presentation -- made precisely that argument in a blistering screed called The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. In his slim 28-page pamphlet, Tufte claimed that Microsoft's ubiquitous software forces people to mutilate data beyond comprehension. For example, the low resolution of a PowerPoint slide means that it usually contains only about 40 words, or barely eight seconds of reading. PowerPoint also encourages users to rely on bulleted lists, a ''faux analytical'' technique, Tufte wrote, that dodges the speaker's responsibility to tie his information together. And perhaps worst of all is how PowerPoint renders charts. Charts in newspapers like The Wall Street Journal contain up to 120 elements on average, allowing readers to compare large groupings of data. But, as Tufte found, PowerPoint users typically produce charts with only 12 elements. Ultimately, Tufte concluded, PowerPoint is infused with ''an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.''

Microsoft officials, of course, beg to differ. Simon Marks, the product manager for PowerPoint, counters that Tufte is a fan of ''information density,'' shoving tons of data at an audience. You could do that with PowerPoint, he says, but it's a matter of choice. ''If people were told they were going to have to sit through an incredibly dense presentation,'' he adds, ''they wouldn't want it.'' And PowerPoint still has fans in the highest corridors of power: Colin Powell used a slideware presentation in February when he made his case to the United Nations that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Of course, given that the weapons still haven't been found, maybe Tufte is onto something. Perhaps PowerPoint is uniquely suited to our modern age of obfuscation -- where manipulating facts is as important as presenting them clearly. If you have nothing to say, maybe you need just the right tool to help you not say it.

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Why did the Shuttle crash? Because PowerPoint makes you dumb. In August, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board at NASA released Volume 1 of its report on why the space shuttle crashed. As expected, the ship's foam insulation was the main cause of the disaster. But the board also fingered another unusual culprit: PowerPoint, Microsoft's well-known ''slideware'' program.

NASA, the board argued, had become too reliant on presenting complex information via PowerPoint, instead of by means of traditional ink-and-paper technical reports. When NASA engineers assessed possible wing damage during the mission, they presented the findings in a confusing PowerPoint slide -- so crammed with nested bullet points and irregular short forms that it was nearly impossible to untangle. ''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 sternly noted.

PowerPoint is the world's most popular tool for presenting information. There are 400 million copies in circulation, and almost no corporate decision takes place without it. But what if PowerPoint is actually making us stupider?

CIS 50 – PowerPoint Page: 3