Death By Powerpoint

Bobby Eccleston

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The last few years of article headlines state the controversy concisely: “Death by... PowerPoint,” “Power pointless,” “PowerPoint has power to bore audiences,” and “Did PowerPoint make the space shuttle crash?” The latter headline illustrates how heated the argument against the slide-ware program, PowerPoint, has become, with the debate being stoked by PowerPoint’s ubiquitous nature in today’s workplace. Instead of a creative tool for presentations, PowerPoint has turned into a crutch; unfortunately, the employees and leaders of the business world have turned on the software when they should be attacking the cripples themselves. According to Edward Tuft, Professor Emeritus at Yale University, PowerPoint played a role in the disintegration of the space shuttle Columbia as it reentered the Earth’s atmosphere in January, 2003. The disaster was caused by a one pound piece of foam insulation slamming into the shuttle wing’s thermal tiles during takeoff, punching a hole through the vital heat shield. Tuft’s essay “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within” is considered by some to be the pinnacle argument against the slide-ware. In this essay, six pages are devoted to describing the detrimental culture of information-exchange at NASA caused by the abuse of PowerPoint presentations in relaying critical information. Tuft writes: To help NASA officials assess the threat, Boeing Corporation engineers quickly prepared 3 reports, a total of 28 PowerPoint slides, dealing with the debris impact. These reports provided mixed readings of the threat to the Columbia; the lowerlevel bullets often mentioned doubts and uncertainties, but the highlighted executive summaries and big-bullet conclusions were quite optimistic. Convinced

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that the reports indicated no problem… NASA officials decided that the Columbia was safe… To the benefit of all future astronauts, Edward Tuft was not the only person to sight the insidious reliance on PowerPoint by NASA. As reported by Ruth Marcus, in his Washington Post article “PowerPoint: Killer App?” the Columbia Accident Investigation Board concluded, “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 went even further and cited the space agency for “‘the endemic use of PowerPoint’ substituted for rigorous technical analysis.” This statement in opposition to the use of PowerPoint was not buried in the depths Board’s report, but was instead highlighted by a full page of critique, condemning NASA’s culture of reliance on the presentation software. Besides the deadly effects of PowerPoint, the slide-ware has faced many attacks over another undesirable trait: the power to bore. “Some of the world's most satisfying naps, deepest daydreams and most elaborate notebook doodles are inspired by the following phrase: ‘I'll just queue up this PowerPoint presentation. ...,’” Josh Shaffer writes in his The News & Observer article. One would be hard pressed to find someone that does not share this sentiment in today’s business environment. According to Microsoft’s estimates, everyday, PowerPoint is used to make more than 30 million presentations in boardrooms, conference rooms, and even classrooms around the world (Maynard). If one were to add up the number of slides since Microsoft’s purchase of PowerPoint from Apple Computer in 1990, he would come away with a sum in the trillions (Chadwick). Like McDonalds and french-fries,

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PowerPoint presentations have become an expected element at businesses of all types, and many people are getting sick of them. Andrew Ferguson, a Bloomberg News columnist, argues that PowerPoint not only skewers the entire concept of discussion during presentations, but jabs at the very heart of the writing process as he knows it. “…like other efficiencies, PowerPoint eliminates serendipity: Gone are the discursive thoughts, the throwaway notions, the casual asides or accidents that might otherwise have led to unexpected ways of thinking about things,” he protests. Business meetings have now been reduced primarily to staring at a screen, reading along, slide after slide, with the speaker. But more hazardous than this aspect, Ferguson also points out the slide-ware’s propensity towards “making us dumb.” He states that “Expressing yourself in sentences and paragraphs rather than phrases and fragments was once understood as a mark of intellectual maturity… PowerPoint in practice represents a regression rather than an advance.” Ferguson is not the only person to take up this stance that PowerPoint is leading otherwise intelligent presenters astray. One of the most cited quotes I have come across regarding PowerPoint is this: “Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely.” Edward Tuft returns to one of his seemingly most favorite arguments again in a 2003 Wired Magazine article to say, “PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play -very loud, very slow, and very simple… Such misuse ignores the most important rule of speaking: Respect your audience.” Beyond respecting your audience, a presenter must respect himself. Unless a speaker is actually selling something, a presentation has no grounds acting as a sales pitch, or worse, a wild display of one’s ability to tinker with goofy animations and effects that will only retract from the information one wants to convey. “With PowerPoint, we

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are all the Tom Cruise of our offices, only not as good looking and much more wacky” (Goldman). If one does manage to respect himself and his audience, a PowerPoint presentation can impress. Anyone who saw the movie An Inconvenient Truth this past summer may not have realized she was being mesmerized by a PowerPoint presentation. Al Gore’s presentation is a prime example of what a speaker has to do to convey his message to an audience. He is engaging, eloquent, persuasive, and respectful; only after ensuring that these qualities enforce his argument, does he use PowerPoint as a tool, a visual tool to work his message into the viewers’ hearts and minds. This sentiment towards the movie was echoed by movie critic, Sarah Marchildon, when she said, “Who knew a PowerPoint presentation could be so captivating?” As so strongly proven by An Inconvenient Truth’s success at the box office, a PowerPoint presentation can be captivating; the ability to captivate, however, lies not with the software but with the speaker. As a simile between PowerPoint and the speaker, Scott Ward, a communications professor at American University, states, “If you drive a Maserati 600 mph into a tree, you don't blame the Maserati for its power. You should have driven it slower” (Shaffer). Like babies and razorblades, a tool in the wrong hand can have perilous consequences, and PowerPoint is no exception. Some speakers, like artist and musician David Byrne, see the inherent value of PowerPoint, but at the same time acknowledge its misuse. This misuse is why Byrne began to use PowerPoint in the first place; he used the software as a parody to promote a book about sales presentations. He writes: Although I began by making fun of the medium, I soon realized I could actually create things that were beautiful. I could bend the program to my own whim and

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use it as an artistic agent. The pieces became like short films: Some were sweet, some were scary, and some were mysterioso. I discovered that even without text, I could make works that were "about" something, something beyond themselves, and that they could even have emotional resonance. Yes, this man is describing his PowerPoint presentation. Byrne has now embraced the presentation software, highlighted by his 2005 book tour featuring a presentation called “I (Heart) PowerPoint.” Tim McKeough, writing in the Toronto Star, says, “Byrne maintains that the proper use, or misuse, of PowerPoint lies [sic] in the hands of the user… he notes sadly, ‘really terrible speakers will put up a PowerPoint slide and just read from it.’” What should prospective PowerPoint users do in the face of these criticisms? As revealed above, a successful performance can be accomplished as long as the speaker is the focus of the show, not the PowerPoint slides. As Michael Cohen said, “Go to any conference today and it's patently obvious that PowerPoint has become a crutch; a substitute for conveying ideas and emotions.” He argues further whether or not the speaker even needed to show up in the first place, given that in many cases, a speaker will hand out copies of his slides to the audience and then proceed to read aloud what he has just handed out. In the same article, Jerry Doyle agrees, “The real problem is that many presenters are under the impression that PowerPoint… has become the presentation itself!” Rather than announce the much agreed upon nuances of PowerPoint, Doyle offers some ground rules needed when utilizing the software: “[1] Always Provide a Compelling Opener… [2] Understand the difference between 'visual aid' and 'visual crutch'… [3] Don't jam everything onto one slide… [4] Remember the Billboard

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Principle… [5] The audience came to hear you.” All of these rules allude to the fact that a presentation’s success or failure depends on the speaker, not the slideshow. PowerPoint is a useful tool designed to help convey a message to an audience, and no fault lies with a presenter that chooses to use it appropriately. However, using the software correctly is the key, for, if used incorrectly, PowerPoint will help only in disengaging a speaker and his message from the audience. By abusing PowerPoint, the presenter turns the table on himself and the software ends up using him.

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Works Cited

Byrne, David. “Learning to Love PowerPoint.” Wired Magazine. Issue 11.09. Accessed 10/26/2006. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt1.html Chadwick, Ian. “PowerPoint has power to bore audiences.” Belleville Intelligencer. pg A14. 6/6/2005. Cohen, Michael and Jerry Doyle. “Honk If You Hate PowerPoint: Miller DeMartine Group Offers the Following as a Public Service to Any Client - Marketing, Public Relations, Investor Relations or Design - Who Ever Trembled at the Thought of Doing One More PowerPoint Presentation.” PR Newswire. 11/5/2004. Ferguson, Andrew. “The case against PowerPoint.” Ottawa Citizen. pg F5. 8/3/2006. Goldman, Bob. “Power pointless.” Copley News Service. Section: Work Daze. 8/25/2006. Marchildon, Sarah, et all. “The PowerPoint of no return.” National Post Toronto Edition. pg. PM8. 6/9/2006. Marcus, Ruth. “PowerPoint: Killer App?” The Washington Post. pg A17. 8/30/2005. Maynard, Steve. “Federal Way might stop PowerPoints.” The News Tribune. Section: State and Regional News. 6/5/2006. McKeough, Tim. “The art of PowerPoint Blame user, not software, says Byrne.” The Toronto Star. pg. D01. 3/13/2005. Shaffer, Josh. “Software can't repair sheer hot air; Yet PowerPoint is trendy way to say little at great length.” The News & Observer. pg A1. 4/27/2006. Tuft, Edward. “PowerPoint Does Rocket Science--and Better Techniques for Technical Reports.” Accessed 10/26/2006. http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB&topic_id=1

Tuft, Edward. “PowerPoint Is Evil.” Wired Magazine. Issue 11.09. Accessed 10/26/2006. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html