Presentation Skills That Will Take You to the Top (Collection), 2/e

39. PowerPoint and the Military: Sometimes More Is More

A New York Times article by Elisabeth Bumiller, titled, “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint,” showed a dense, complicated PowerPoint slide that the Pentagon used in a presentation to describe the complexity of the situation in Afghanistan. The slide, a swirl of overlapping lines, arrows, words, and colors, resembling a bowl of spaghetti, proceeded to make its viral way around the Internet as yet another example of the abuses of PowerPoint, particularly by the military.^F39.1

Richard Engel, the NBC News chief foreign correspondent, was the first to publish the slide on his blog, where he described two diametrically different reactions to the slide from the military itself:

For some ...