The phluff factor

The presentation tool PowerPoint is killing our capacity for conceptual thinking, says its nemesis, Edward Tufte.

Of all the ways that pushing the universe's frontiers can go awry - running out of oxygen in space, equipment failure, any of the dreaded rocket malfunctions movies love - this was probably the last imaginable. There were no astronauts; no high-risk maneuvers; no space walks. There was simply a meeting.

As the space shuttle Columbia orbited earth in January 2002, National Aeronautics and Space Administration engineers gathered to discuss a piece of foam that had struck the craft's wing during its launch. A PowerPoint presentation by Boeing offered research and a key slide headlined "Review of Test Data Indicates Conservatism for Tile Penetration". A casual observer might have been forgiven for thinking the Columbia was safe - indeed, no further probe of the threat was undertaken.

We all know the outcome. Columbia exploded on re-entry and the cause was finally determined to be the damage caused by the foam. In its report, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board said it was "easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize it addresses a life-threatening situation". Did NASA learn its lesson? Apparently not. The investigation board complained it was also forced to endure several PowerPoint sessions during its probe.

"The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA," its report said. The man whose work fingered PowerPoint, Yale University Professor Edward Tufte, is less diplomatic. The Microsoft software, he declares, is so "stupid" and "evil" that no "serious person" would use it.

"Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that claimed to make us beautiful but didn't," Tufte says. "Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: making us stupid, degrading the quality and credibility of our communication, turning us into bores, wasting our colleagues' time. These side effects, and the resulting unsatisfactory cost/benefit ratio, would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall."

Yet if you work at any major corporation, chances are you'll instead soon find yourself sitting in a darkened meeting room as a PowerPoint presentation drones on. Far from being recalled, the computer program seems more ubiquitous than ever. But has it, and other technological advances, really helped us communicate more effectively?

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Sometimes it's hard to remember the days before laptop computers, before email and voicemail, before BlackBerrys and PDAs and a 24/7 world. Just two decades ago, the business presentation tool of choice was the overhead projector, the cheap and easy successor to 35mm slides.

In 1984, the former head of computer science research at Bell-Northern Research, Bob Gaskins, formed a Silicon Valley software firm called Forethought. Gaskins, who acknowledges his work was inspired by the work of a BNR colleague, Whitfield Diffie, was developing a graphics program to link slides of information on screen and allow computer users to create and edit the content. He called it "Presenter" but had an epiphany in the shower and renamed it "PowerPoint". It went on sale in April 1987.

"I can't describe how wonderful it was," Gaskins told The New Yorker in 2001. "When we demonstrated at trade shows, we were mobbed." Microsoft bought Forethought for $US14 million in cash but allowed Gaskins and his team to remain at arm's length, a situation that changed as the software giant sought to more tightly integrate PowerPoint with its suite of Office software products. In 1992, Gaskins quit - followed quickly by several other original developers - and said the program had become "a cog in the great machine".

The common refrain from those involved in PowerPoint's creation is that it has morphed from a tool designed to complement business presentations into the entire presentation. Critics argue it has removed those trained in the art of graphic and text communication from the process by allowing anyone to create presentations, particularly by using PowerPoint's AutoContent feature, which was added in the mid-1990s and offers ready-made presentation templates.

"When you think of it, colour used to be in the hands of professional artists and graphic artists. Now it's in the hands of anybody with a dot matrix printer," says the principal architect at BioLogic Software Consulting, Ben Lieberman. "I have seen some great presentations. I have seen some miserable presentations. On the whole, I think [PowerPoint] helps but, again, it's putting a really sophisticated tool in the hands of people who aren't really trained in its use. I think Microsoft recognised that by coming up with the templates. With the templates, at least they're not doing any damage. The content might suck, but the presentation will be OK."

Tufte hates the AutoContent feature, arguing "designer features will not salvage weak content". In a career that spans three decades, Tufte has become the world's foremost analyst of visual information and its effectiveness. His trilogy of books - The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Graphics Press, 1983); Envisioning Information (Graphics Press, 1990); and Visual Explanations (Graphics Press, 1997) - are regarded as classics, while The New York Times even named him "the da Vinci of data". In dissecting tens of PowerPoint presentations, Tufte almost always reaches the same conclusion: slideware such as PowerPoint reduces the analytic quality of presentations; templates weaken verbal and spatial reasoning; and serious analysis is replaced by what he calls "PowerPointPhluff" - chart junk, over-produced layouts, cheerleader-type logotypes and branding, and corny clip art.

"PP convenience for the speaker can be costly to both content and audience," Tufte writes in his 28-page evisceration of the program, "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint". "These costs result from the cognitive style characteristic of the standard default PP presentation: foreshortening of evidence and thought, low spatial resolution, a deeply hierarchical single-path structure as the model for organising every type of content, breaking up narrative and data into slides and minimal fragments, rapid temporal sequencing of thin information rather than focused spatial analysis, conspicuous decoration and Phluff, a preoccupation with format not content, an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch."

In short, Tufte told AFR BOSS there is "a ton of empirical evidence indicating the stupidity of PP compared to all sorts of other tools for communication". Indeed, one of Tufte's primary criticisms of the software is its inability - through low resolution, the urging of templates and other factors - to display and convey more than a handful of statistics at a time. He calculates that statistical graphics in 2003 in Science magazine on average displayed more than 1000 numbers, Nature magazine more than 700, The New York Times 120, and The Wall Street Journal 112. PowerPoint averaged 12 numbers per graphic, topping only the Russian propaganda newspaper Pravda during the Communist era, which averaged five numbers per graphic.

Larry Gales, the senior computer consultant in the Computing & Communications department of the University of Washington, agrees the "principal limitation in displays today is low resolution". Anyone who has squinted to read figures during a PowerPoint presentation can relate, which is why so many people substitute numbers for pie or bar charts or line graphs. "Tufte makes a big point of the fact the human eye can grab a whole bunch of information at once ... whereas if you have a low-res screen you are forced to go screen-to-screen, so you lose context," Gales says, although he believes both the internet and computer displays can convey some information more effectively than the printed word.

"I don't hate [PowerPoint] as much as Tufte does," he adds. "He really hates it because it forces a very sequential type of display, especially when you just have a few bullets. I would say we now have a new medium of communications power and we have not yet learned how to use it effectively. That the transition from a laboriously constructed paper technology to a very quick summation combined with current low-resolution screens and a lack of standards in terms of how materials should be navigated - that is the problem."

Microsoft estimates about 30 million PowerPoint presentations are made every day. The software boasts some 400 million users globally. It is not, regardless of what Tufte and his supporters say, going away. "We're proud of it," Microsoft's chief product manager for Office software, Dan Leach, told The New York Times in 2003. Leach added it is a tool, "a blank for you to fill in".

That is the central argument of PowerPoint's defenders: don't shoot the messenger. Tad Simons, the editorial director of Presentations magazine, puts the software in the same drawer as email, mobile telephones, video-conferencing and other technologies that have made communication possible by more means and at a faster rate than ever. "You can't blame PowerPoint for bad presentations any more than you can blame a frying pan for a lousy meal," Simons says. "It's a tool. Unfortunately, it is a tool most people use poorly, so it gets a bad rap. Most people are terrible cooks, too."

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One of the major problems with Tufte's criticism - in relation not just to PowerPoint but to the effectiveness of communication generally - is whether it is grounded in reality. People seem to want bite-sized information and mediums are complying, whether it is newspapers embracing the use of colour and news briefs, or cable television networks constantly scrolling tickertape headlines across the screen. Simons suggests Tufte simply "hates the culture that created and uses PowerPoint - the get-it-done, do it fast, sound-bite, bullet-point culture of business that values speed, efficiency and profit over thought, depth and quality".

"PowerPoint isn't evil, it's just a product of its times - which may or may not be evil, depending on your perspective," he says. "Yes, our get-to-the-point business culture sacrifices depth and context for the sake of speed, but is PP the cause? No, I'm afraid it goes much deeper than that - people were ignoring details, subtleties and context well before PowerPoint came along, and will continue to do so long after PowerPoint is gone."

Under these circumstances, the onus appears to be on presenters. If PowerPoint can help the communication challenged, it can also turn good communicators into droning commentators. Executives relate stories of audiences breaking into spontaneous applause not when PowerPoint presentations begin but when the equipment fails.

Experts have myriad suggestions for making PowerPoint more effective. However, the most important is to remember that while it's a reasonable method for displaying visual information - presumably its effectiveness will improve as screen resolutions do - it is not a verbal medium. As Simons notes, PowerPoint slides "are meant to be commented and elaborated upon by a human being, not exist as stand-alone gems of communication craftsmanship".

As for visual information, Tufte, Gales and software architect Lieberman are all proponents of a decidedly low-tech means of communication: the printed handout.

Lieberman likes to refer to the trend towards managers wanting information in small doses as the "eight-and-a-half by eleven mentality", referring to the size in inches of America's equivalent of A4 paper. "When you get into that mentality, you warp your presentation to fit the medium rather than the medium to fit your presentation," Lieberman says.

The solution? "I now present my models on huge pieces of paper and fold them again and again," Lieberman laughs. "Then they can punch holes in them and put them in their notebooks."

Published by AFR BOSS, July 8, 2005.