Those of you familiar with Edward Tufte have probably heard his rants on how PowerPoint brought down the space shuttle, twice. Now I’m certainly not in the camp of thinking that a situation that complex can be boiled down to a simple presentation tool. However; I have to say that I’ve seen a lot of people try to convey some complex knowledge in an 8×6 aspect ratio.

You can’t get people spend 45 minutes actually reading a document, but they’ll sit for an hour in a meeting getting half the information in misleading bullets and pretty pictures designed to be displayed on a condensed screen from 30 feet away. Now I don’t think the problem is PowerPoint itself, but the fact that people use it. Sorry, I’m on a bit of a rant here, but it drives me nuts that smart people would rather take more time to be spoon feed the barest of facts, than to read a well crafted document with details. Do they feel they aren’t being productive if they’re sitting and reading? Are they under the impression that it’s more efficient to focus in on 10% of the information? Is it that they’ve read too many poorly crafter documents? Has modern society destroyed out attentions spans so much that we can only pay attention to information in small bursts, such as a slide with pretty animations? Whatever the reason, I’ve decided to accept this mind set…to a point.

I’ve spent some time pondering this, and thought it would be a good topic explore this month.

Thanks, talk at you tomorrow.