You may not know who Edward Tufte is, although he’s relatively well known and deservedly so, because he is an expert in visual design for information communication. I have a couple of his books (Visual Explanations and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information) and, imho, they are definitive references on presentation. If only our industry actualy indulged itself in reading such books. The New York Times calls Tufte “The Leonardo da Vinci of data.”

Tufte is not a great fan of PowerPoint—not because he’s particularly critical of the software’s features and functions, but because it is used pervasively and, as he points out in a rather devastating manner, it is often used badly.

Personally, by the way, I think PowerPoint rocks. It is a great aid to presentation, but most of its users have no idea at all about its extensive capabilities or how to deploy them effectively. I guess I could rattle on here—in fact I will…

Few people are ever taught presentation skills and thus few people are capable of creating a really well designed set of PowerPoint slides to complement a presentation. The problem is with the workman, not his tools.

Tufte might not agree, but never mind.

He has some devastating criticism of the use of PowerPoint at NASA. “Nearly all engineering presentations at NASA are made in PowerPoint” he writes, and then asks the question “Does PowerPoint’s cognitive style affect the quality of engineering analysis?”

Well, yes it does. Or more to the point, Tufte has a copy of a NASA engineers’ presentation concerning the danger to the doomed Columbia space shuttle after lift off—when some foam insulation broke off and fatally damaged the left wing. Apparently, the PowerPoint presentation was given while Columbia was still in orbit and its astronauts were still very much alive.

Tufte does an intelligent and detailed analysis.

If you want to read the nitty gritty click here. He concludes that the very organization of information on the “slide that mattered” concealed rather than revealed the risk to Columbia. Read it yourself and form your own opinion. My cut on it is that a horribly fatal failure to communicate took place, but I’m inclined to fault the driver rather than the vehicle. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the vehicle couldn’t be improved.