Produce Powerful Presentations (Collection)

26. Blame the Penmanship, Not the Pen: Operator versus Machine Error

Edward Tufte is a virtual one-stop shop for all things graphical. He lectures, publishes, writes, and comments extensively on the design of data. One of his books, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, has long been a standard on many business bookshelves. In 2003, Mr. Tufte published a widely distributed 32-page pamphlet called The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, in which he contends that “PowerPoint routinely disrupts and trivializes content” and charges that the software’s templates “weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis.”^F26.1

This charge is the equivalent of blaming the Montblanc pen company for illiteracy and illegibility. ...