Defending PowerPoint Against Tufte | Hacker News Reader

Defending PowerPoint Against Tufte

john-foreman.com

36 pointsmistermcgruff21 comments

the point this article is making is that powerpoint is not useless because it is a great sales tool - precisely for the reasons tufte says it is anathema to clear thinking - that it is about control of the audience and not empowerment in the sense of allowing the audience to be on equal footing with information.

steve jobs is a great example of this - think "thousands of songs in your pocket" versus the GB size. Apple is a master of selective data slices to jazz up their keynotes, which are, after all, gigantic sales pitches.

i've done this myself with my own customers - a powerpoint deck is a way to control the entire conversation - to steer to strong points and conveniently not mention weak ones. it works really well with almost all audiences. people in most cases will allow the speaker to follow "the deck".

so - good for sales. not good for nasa. and this is the point tufte makes.

probably not good for booz-allen either, but it might explain their NSA security lapses, right? i'll hazard a guess their security review was a powerpoint deck.

I enjoyed this analysis of PowerPoint and agree with it wholeheartedly.

When I was studying business communication in college, a few of my professors demanded that if we chose to use words in our presentations, we were limited to three.

At first this was a difficult constraint, but I learned to love it, gradually implementing more visuals until my presentations were almost 100% photographs and data visualizations.

This improved the audience's response by leaps and bounds. They just can't comprehend all the information from a slide and a lengthy speech simultaneously.

Presenters should only use visuals to augment effective public speaking.

Any class I had in college, I self-imposed that constraint on myself. Well, more 'no words'. And yes, I think it helped tremendously.

That said, my more general rule of thumb is "Is this something I would have bothered to make a colored transparency, costs and all, if this was thirty years ago?"

If it -is-, by all means, make a slide.

If it isn't, don't make a slide of it.

If you're not certain, because it's something like an outline that you feel is necessary to follow your logic, or similar, make a handout of it, so that users can look at it -if they need to-, and it doesn't steal your focus.

Look at the work of John Sweller, a perceptual psychologist, for research on what happens when people are asked to absorb information visually and aurally at the same time. Supports your teachers' views.

As someone who until recently was a working scientist, all this anti-Powerpoint, pro-Tufte talk on the interwebs just seems weird and out-of-touch. Powerpoint/Keynote is absolutely central to modern science, just as overhead slides were before Powerpoint/Keynote came along. Powerpoint can be used well or badly. And most scientists don't really have the time or inclination to obsess over whether their data is being presented as beautifully as possible. That strikes me more as a fetish of people who aren't actually doing science.

And if you think that scientists aren't trying to convince you of something, you're just being silly---they're trying to convince you of whatever it is they think they've discovered. My impression is that this is usually done in good faith, and in an intellectually honest way, but still, they're 100% trying to convince you of something. If they're not, they're not really doing their job, which is to discover new things and convince other people that what they've discovered is true.

It seems like most "anti-PowerPoint" sentiment is actually anti-bullet-list sentiment. In which case, maybe its proponents should just say that.

>So really his problem isn’t with PowerPoint then is it? It’s with how the enterprise uses PowerPoint. What he’s really criticizing is not PowerPoint as a tool, but rather the default use of PowerPoint by an old guard.

Well, thank you Captain Obvious. Since he uses slides himself, it's obvious he is NOT criticizing it as a tool.

That said, it's not "the default use by an old guard", but the "default use by almost everybody, period".

Your snark is unwarranted and unfair. Few people have been to a Tufte conference, but many more are (at least vaguely) aware of his distaste for PowerPoint. Making the tool/use distinction explicit will help more people think critically about what is good and bad about PowerPoint specifically and presenting data generally.

It may be obvious, but throughout Tufte's work he ignores that distinction and conflates the two. So it must not be obvious to Tufte.

I don't think he conflates anything in his mind.

He merely uses the name of the tool as a shorthand to how it's used 99% of the time -- which is a very common language practice.

There are two distinct types of data visualizations: ones that seek to understand data and ones that use data to convince.

Tufte believes strongly in the first: we should strive for understanding the data and avoid distorting what the data has to say. He calls this "graphical integrity". This is how scientists use data visualization.

However most data visualization is of the second type: decide what you want to say first then use data visualization to support your point. After all we have products/services/policies to sell. This type of data visualization is so prevalent that if a visualization doesn't make an obvious point we are confused. PowerPoint is simply a product designed for this greater demand.

We should not be surprised that the author of this piece, former Booz Allen consultant to the government now MailChimp "data scientist", seems to be in the more common camp. Perhaps his visualizations are mostly used to sell clients on MailChimp.

It's not just about selling. I was a journalist for many years, and the worst kinds of visualizations and charts were just data dumps. The best kind had a point of view, or tried to make sense of the data and tell a story with it.

Now, if you distorted or hid conflicting data in the process of doing this, that's obviously bad; but data presented with a point of view can be good, because humans innately respond to stories. It's up to the reader/viewer/listener to think critically about the story.

As best I can tell Tufte thinks "data dumps" are the best kinds of visualizations: "Above all else show the data". Unlike salesman, campaigners or reporters Tufte doesn't think good data visualization is about getting a response from the viewer. He thinks we should show the data as best we can so that the viewer can learn from it. I like to think of this as the viewpoint of a scientist or researcher.

This is a rather extreme perspective and probably not effective in most situations where data visualization is used. The techniques used in the famous book "How to Lie with Statistics" are actually mostly about data visualization and are much more practical. This explains their popularity and that of tools that emphasize them like PowerPoint.

From Tufte's point of view we have a lemons market in data visualization: "bad" visualization drives out "good" visualization because it is more effective[1]. Editors, businessmen and politicians will always choose the visualization that empasises their point (i.e. distorts the underlying data). While they are happy with the results Tufte is dismayed.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

'visual communication is a “moral and ethical” undertaking for the presenter.' Not in any way germane to the post, but yeah there is an ethical issue with work on data visualization. Both in how you represent data and what data you are willing to represent. It should generally preclude one from work as a data scientist for Booz Allen. (If you ever wondered how the NSA deals with all the data they get, people like the OP are the answer).

This is one of those situations where you have to see it to believe it. Yes, John, you can spend all the time in the world making your PowerPoint presentations look and behave like Keynote, but why cut off your nose to spite your face? Just use the better product.

One of simplest examples of the attention to detail that Apple has is the default slide layouts of PowerPoint and Keynote.

Microsoft decided at the dawn of PowerPoint that slides should be white with black text. Why? Because users want to work on a "blank canvas". White is bright and noticeable! No one will miss a thing!

Apple, by contrast, defaults to a black background with white text. Financial consultants around the world scoff in disgust. "What is this, a Hot Topic presentation?" they joke.

Now fire up both on a projector, the intended medium. Whereas PowerPoint blinds the audience and washes out even the blackest of Arial, Keynote's white text stands alone beautifully on a blank projection screen -- the end result is a sleek, seamless look that you almost never see in PowerPoint.

> Microsoft decided at the dawn of PowerPoint that slides should be white with black text. Why?

Because at the dawn of PowerPoint, most presentations were printed on to acetate and delivered with an overhead projectior.

And the overhead projector was used in a lighted conference room, so that people could see the presenter and one another and consult papers, and black-on-white was easier to read.

The style of light-on-dark came from 35mm slides in 35mm projectors, almost always used in darkened rooms and easier to read in the dark.

When PowerPoint expanded from acetate overheads to also make 35mm slides, templates in both styles (dark-on-light, light-on-dark) were included. Both styles persist in today's electronic presentations, for use in appropriate surroundings, although it is easy for presenters to make a poor selection.

It was clearer when the rule was that a photocopied transparency measuring 8.5 x 11 inches should be dark-on-light, and a transparency measuring 24mmx36mm in a 2-inch square mount should be light-on-dark.

Man, I used to have to rent overhead projectors for an academic conference until 2009! Some of the profs were seriously old school and their acetates were hand drawn.

Thankfully the number of projectors went down from 15 to 5 to "1 just in case" over the years.

And the world has moved on, something Microsft seems to very poor at adapting to.

I also use black backgrounds (with LaTeX beamer, though), because I like the aesthetic, but it turns out it's not very practical. Unfortunately it often makes the text difficult to read, due to light from outside or artificial lighting; most slides have a white background which are perfectly readable in these conditions.

yay, a fellow Beamer user!

Excel is a much larger problem than PowerPoint. Not only it costs millions in eventual errors, it also impedes low-hanging-fruit automation that should be there -- Suzy from HR should be used to something like Mathematica for _everything_, and the finance staff should be interfacing with SAS/Stata for the large datasets.

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