PowerPoint in the military

[Michael West <WestM -at- ap -dot- aurecongroup -dot- com>]

(Resending this with a proper subject line)

Dan Goldstein wrote:

>> See the article at 
>> <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html>

>> But having said that: The offending diagram in the 
>> first article isn't actually an indictment of PowerPoint.


Exactly. It is a silly, confused article. The reporter had little 
knowledge of the subject matter, and appeared not to know a system 
dynamics diagram from a set of bullet points.

And while I am a great admirer of Professor Tufte's other work, I think he 
gets it wrong on Powerpoint  too.

PowerPoint is a bloody graphics program, fer pete's sake. A set of bullet 
points is not a fully developed analysis or strategy or thesis. At best, 
it's a convenient outline or summary for people who know the difference. 
It doesn't make people dumb. They have to start out that way.

Nor is is a program for professional-quality technical graphics. It's 
slideshows for the masses, a few notches up from those blotchy, illegible 
b&w transparencies that my college professors used to throw at us. 

I reckon anyone who thinks the problem is the tool rather than the user is 
off the mark.

A newspaper article can be just as "dumb" as a slide show, but we read the 
papers anyway.

-- 
Mike West







Disclaimer - http://www.aurecongroup.com/apac/disclaimer/ 




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