The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]

https://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/pi/2016_2017/phil/tufte-powerpoint.pdf

132 75 2 years ago

inf.ed.ac.uk

I've loaned my hardcopy of this classic to many people in my industry. Regrettably it has not had any impact and Powerpoint still runs rampant. I am not a Tufte fanboy but this article hits perfectly.

PaulHoule5• 2 years ago

When I was in my business development phase I was taught to make presentations for C-levels at Fortune 500 companies like this:

Make a Powerpoint deck with 50 slides. Compact that down to 20 slides without losing anything.

Get to the point where you have 50 slides like that.

Repeat this process two or three times until you have a deck that is stupendously high density that gives the impression that you respect their intelligence.

---

At times in life Powerpoint has really been my medium, it is much easier for me to put together presentations by putting together various graphics and symbols in PP than anything else, and I've tried.

OldGuyInTheClub7• 2 years ago

My experience: The higher you go, the dumber they get.

jncfhnb6• 2 years ago

I’m a McKinsey consultant and this reads as kind of crazy. Nobody is ever doing anything with 50 distinct slides.

My general advice is a title that is a sentence that explains your point, then a visual that proves it and a sidebar of supporting insights so you don’t have to be an expert at reading the visual. Frankly I think it’s very effective and is very closely tied to writing guidelines. The important thing is getting your thesis up top. The title of a page needs to be the only thing people really need to read to understand what you’re trying to convey. The contents of the page are just the details of why you’re saying it.

Most people instinctively do this in reverse and have a page where they throw a visual onto the page and make the title of the page just an announcement of what the visual is; and then either verbally or with small text callouts explain why it matters.

OhMeadhbh• 2 years ago

I am absolutely a Tufte FanBoi, I even got him to autograph my copy of Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

efitz• 2 years ago

Nobody has the patience anymore to be presented to or read in any form other than bullet points and low information density charts.

I grew up before computers and learned to communicate in the absence of all the short attention span distractions that exist today. I remember the first time I picked up a Wired magazine and couldn’t tolerate the insane lack of continuity. I still cannot stand the video style of images projected for a fraction of a second one after the other.

But no one has the patience for my storytelling style. Congratulations if you got this far, most people gave up if they didn’t grok my point in the first two sentences.

Yes slideware is ugly and low information and boring and insulting to the audience, but some people, particularly in higher levels of management, just want to be spoon fed bullet lists and then feel like they’re making informed decisions.

wcfrobert• 2 years ago

The number of books, blogs, papers, textbooks, monograph, tutorials, reports, comments that are worthwhile reading will only ever increase though. Today is as information-lite as we're going to get. I feel like it's only natural to try and condense all this data (usually in a lossy way).

I hate PowerPoint but bullet points could be quite information dense. They lose effectiveness past 6 bullets due to readability reasons, but I still prefer them over fluffy low signal prose. I think at the end of the day, it all depends on the writer. I got to the end of your comment just fine. But I cannot and will not get to the end of a corporate jargon filled report or ppt.

OldGuyInTheClub7• 2 years ago

some people, particularly in higher levels of management, just want to be spoon fed bullet lists and then feel like they’re making informed decisions.

That caste likes to say, "I have people that do that for me."

mkleczek4• 2 years ago

In the age of LLMs there is no point in writing long prose. The more content is generated the more people will move to higher information density formats. Why bother with generating long text if the reader is going to summarise it with a LLM anyway? OTOH - citing Ben Affleck: "why would I bother to read something you didn't bother to write?"

OldGuyInTheClub7• 2 years ago

cf. Doonesbury on Californian/Mellow-Speak:

https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1979/05/16

copperx2• 2 years ago

What has a higher information density than text? Or do you mean that writing will evolve to become increasingly higher density?

CRConrad• 2 years ago

Upvote for the Affleck quote. Damn, that guy is (providing he came up with it himself) not so stupid after all.

funcDropShadow• 2 years ago

In the age of LLMs there is no point in writing long prose. The more content is generated ...

Wow, do you really equate long prose with "generated content"? Long prose is novels, deep non-fiction books, long letters, and much more. You can like them or not. In comparison "generated content" is sugar-coated garbage, like way too many social media posts. There was never any point in reading such "generated content".

jasdi2• 2 years ago

Its not that they want to be spoon fed, that is the ever decreasing bandwidth available as info and complexity in environment keeps exploding.

As the saying goes "glue people" just need to know a little bit more about coding than the sales guy, and a little more sales than the coder, little more accounting than the lawyer and a little more law than the accountant etc etc.

ssivark3• 2 years ago

Could it be that such increasing specialization (sales, accounting, coder, glue…) is driven in part by decreasing attention spans and ability to focus? Maybe nobody is able to exert significant deliberate cognitive processing on anything beyond a narrow slice that they are already comfortable with.

herghost• 2 years ago

I remember the first time I picked up a Wired magazine and couldn’t tolerate the insane lack of continuity.

I've never been able to articulate why I couldn't stand Wired so succinctly! Thankyou

Angostura2• 2 years ago

I can actualy cope quite well with the slides that have 5 words on. But typically in the organisations that I have worked for, people will cram 200 words on a slide and then droningly reads them out.

No matter how often I explain that 'people can either listen to what you are saying, or read the slide - pick one' - it doesn't really sink in

plagiarist• 2 years ago

A recent colleague often gave my team feedback like that. But we listened to him and all our presentations were much better afterwards. I hope I've internalized that idea somewhat.

ipython• 2 years ago

Possibly unpopular opinion: PowerPoint is just a tool, and most people not only suck at making slides but are poor storytellers to boot. If you are a good storyteller and can effectively use the medium (as in, not just dump a bunch of bullets on a slide), you can actually convey a lot of information in a combined slide + narrative format.

OldGuyInTheClub7• 2 years ago

Tufte addresses that in the postscript. It is the first item in it.

MengerSponge• 2 years ago

I, a brave and iconoclastic thinker, didn't read Tufte's article before arguing that people, not design, are the problem.

conductr• 2 years ago

Also probably unpopular opinion: most people, in business anyways, don't use or even expect powerpoint to be aiding a typical "presentation". I think we conflate powerpoints in meetings as "presentations" just like a Ted Talk is a "presentation". In business, these types of presentations do take place but are hardly a tip of the iceberg in terms of all the powerpoints being made. Under the surface, the lion's share of powerpoints are just talking points for a meeting. They help give alignment on what they want to talk about, points they want to make during the meeting, structure their meeting flow, and importantly - they give people something to read before/after the meeting to and reference back to the meeting topics. They also serve as a medium for data sharing, eg. charts, tables, and such. It also anticipates and answers some questions amongst many other things.

Anyways, I'm not saying this excuses the quality of most of these things but imagine how much effort you'd put into a Ted Talk versus how much you'd put into a 30 minute meeting when you may only have a few days notice. Most meeting topics are simply boring, it's work, or someone else's domain of work, shouldn't need a ton of narrative fluff to make it digestible, and honestly most powerpoints I see in work in the last decade or so are adequate enough for their purposes. I just stopped being critical of people's powerpoint and storying telling skills long ago and try to focus on the discussion/content being made and what I need to take away/double click on.

datadrivenangel• 2 years ago

And most power points in businesses are actually documents, or worse, dual-purpose artifacts that need to be used as both the presentation materials and an artifact, and fail at both.

fleshmonad• 2 years ago

This holds for everything. Everything is a tool and always stating "It's just a tool, people are using it wrong", doesn't constitute an argument. A tool should be judged on it's usefulness and if a tool is "misused" 90% of the time, it may be worth considering whether it is a good tool at what it aims to achieve.

silvestrov• 2 years ago

I think a major part of being bad presenters is that they don't train but think that they can do well with just a quick go-over of the materials.

Becoming good takes a lot of hard work, lot of redoing of stuff. Just like becoming good at soccer is more than playing games. Many successful YouTubers have learned it's hard work to make good videos.

Like Penn&Teller said: The only secret of magic is that I’m willing to work harder on it than you think it’s worth.

parpfish• 2 years ago

if i'm giving a presentation, i always practice it several times and i always find flaws to fix up(there's no segue from this slide to this one, i need to reorder these so i can introduce X before talking about Y, etc).

but you have to practice the right way.

the terrible, long-winded, confusing presentations you've seen were most likely done by somebody that sees a presentations as merely "talking in front of a group" so their practice would be focused on memorizing lines/facts that want to say. they may sound polished, but it's not necessarily going to be good.

in order for your practice to actually help, you need to go through your presentation while maintaining a strong sense of empathy for the audience. you need to fight a constant battle against the 'curse of knowledge' and force yourself to honestly evaluate what you're doing from the perspective as a first-time listener.

kopirgan• 2 years ago

In 80s I had to create in Harvard graphics, print on white paper for boss to QC ( he can't walk over to your desktop), rinse, repeat then finally get printed in transparencies.

Unless his boss has more changes.

Now it's so easy to create so much crap.

projectileboy• 2 years ago

Is there some reason why Edward Tufte isn’t being properly being credited anywhere? This is copyrighted material.

lolbert6• 2 years ago

educational materials that were originally linked through a proper citation/credit acknowledgement, but thats how hyperlinks work -- its not like someone stole the only copy.

senko• 2 years ago

There's no single "style of PowerPoint". People use it for various, different, things, and if you look at a deck made for one purpose through the lens of another, it'll look atrociously bad.

You can use PowerPoint (or Google Slides, etc) to make:

* Make visuals for your talk (in person, or over zoom); your talk is the main thing, and the backing visuals are there to focus people on what you're saying. Those kinds of slides often have a single sentence, image, chart, or code block. Importantly, those slides carry no meaning/story by themselves - you can't look at that deck without the talk itself.

* Handouts, or material to send over email, etc., in which the slides themselves are a thing (you might not be there to talk about them, or you can expand some of it as a follow-up). Slides are tightly packed with information, which needs to be carefully organized. They're usually bottom-line up-front (google BLUF), with on-slide info organized in pyramid fashion (google MBB slide structure).

(Edit to add: people often want to reuse the same slide deck for both uses, compromise on it, and end up with the worst combination. Nobody wants to do things twice over).

Diametrically apart, optimized for different things; if you're skilled at making those, can be super-useful. Trouble is, it's a skill that very few people are tought how to do. We expect people to be able to create and deliver a presentation without teaching them how to do it.

So what most non-experts end up doing, is what's in the linked book excerpt:

* pick a template you like

* add a bunch of bullet points where each bullet point is a paragraph of text

* fumble about with creating a chart that's only obvious to you (visualisation is a different skill in itself!)

* read the slides, slowly, while having your backs turned to the audience

Yeah, that's torture.

But it's not caused by powerpoint, same like spam is not caused by email. It's not because slides are inherently a worse format than articles or books (different, yes, and not for the same thing). It's just that people legit don't know better.

michaelt• 2 years ago

There's no single "style of PowerPoint".

Sure there is: https://norvig.com/Gettysburg/sld001.htm

Powerpoint presentations have a distinct content and character arising from the medium. The style of powerpoint is:

* 3-5 Bullet points in a big font

  * With indents if at all possible

* Plot with no more than 8 data points

* Prepared and researched in advance, nothing off-the-cuff

* No corrections or clarifications or shifts in focus, it's not possible to edit slides on the fly

* One person 'on stage' with a clicker while everyone else listens quietly

* I don't know if this video is going to play or not

heresie-dabord• 2 years ago

Let's add:

* afterward you might think yourself successful if someone "asks for the slides"

greentxt3• 2 years ago

Yep. A "powerpoint" can be single Edward Tufte graph presented to a room for 30 seconds. Or it could be War and Peace pasted across 10,000 slides. There is no one thing to complain about. Reading this lowered my opinion of tufte, who I have always found great, but also very overrated.

Too• 2 years ago

A lot of the criticism from OP is assuming that the slides exists in a vacuum and that the slides are the presentation. Short bullets? Yeah? It's just a reminder of what was presented in the main talk. They are not supposed to contain the complete content. Now unfortunately, a lot of presenters do the same mistake, get nervous, forget what they were supposed to say and let the nerfed bullets do the talking. Worst style is when they know beforehand that this will happen and add more and longer bullets to compensate for it. Death by powerpoint, guaranteed.

That's not to say bullets are great, the 6 level columbia slide is absolutely horrendous and bullets should not be the first tool one reaches for, contrary to what powerpoint easily invites for. Prefer a good graphical visualization of the raw data and annotate it with insights to back up your main argument, then let your slides back up your talk instead of being driven by them.

There is also the argument that slide decks tend to outlive their verbal presentations, because we are too lazy to create both a slidedeck and a properly written paper. Resulting in confusing low density bullet-lists being shared around. Here, a information dense presentation help, but it's usually not enough and often forces compromises to the main presentation.

enugu• 2 years ago

Some of Tufte's criticism of slide bullets is not specific to PowerPoint, but could be extended to software which work with nested nodes like Roam/Workflowy(software which I like). Workflowy, in fact, allows you to convert a tree of nodes into a linear presentation. Wittgenstein also wrote his classic books as numbered nodes (though not nested).

Indeed, this can also be seen as a critique of structured code editors vs text editing. Mathematics books also follow tree structure a bit, (Def 6.3.1, Example 6.3.2), though there often is some connecting narrative.

The point about oversimplification to fit into a single slide is specific to PowerPoint. But, the critique that organization into discrete nodes often skips over an underlying narrative or a causal structure which connects the nodes is more general.

What can be said in defense of discrete organization? Firstly, the overall narrative is not initially apparent. Listing the pieces together can help to discover this structure.

Secondly, in long essays, the larger point often gets buried in the details. This is especially true in mathematical works where the purpose of a complicated definition/result is only seen a long time later. This also happens in source code, where a lot of preprocessing obscures the central purpose of a function (though of course, source code is not a candidate for a report with sentences anyway).

By forcing these documents to become less dense, the narrative actually becomes more apparent. Whereas with a dense document, the reader's attention can wander away before the punchline.

One issue that Tufte seems to not discuss in the oversimplification critique is that attention/time is limited. Since an organization leader cant read all reports 3 levels down the ladder (either usual style reports or nested trees), there needs to be a strategy for marking specific reports as important and also to mark which details from the document need to be passed on to higher levels of decision making and which details should be only relevant to middle managers.

In the Columbia report, the problem is not oversimplification but that the critical conclusion was mentioned as a low level detail whereas a methodology of choosing a 'conservative' model became the heading.

Could a usual technical report have avoided this issue? The 'conservative' phrase could well have been a section heading and the damage indicated in sentence buried inside the section. But a technical report also has a 'Conclusion' section which could have forced the authors to state their position clearly. This 'Conclusion' section is implicitly a protocol for which information in the report has to be passed up to a higher level. IPCC Reports have a 'Summary for Policymakers' in discrete points (https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/). Tufte, for some reason, doesn't like "Executive Summary".

com2kid• 2 years ago

I've worked on heavy PP based companies, and in companies that requires 5 minute 2 pagers.

Both are here to write (info dense) but having a proper narrative structure with the 2 pager communicates far more than the PowerPoint does. A narrative structure can also drop down to bullet points it needed.

I've seen plenty of 50 page PP decks that ended up with slides full of paragraphs, basically being the worst of all possible communication formats.

Paddywack• 2 years ago

I often tell my people to “stop decking around”, or “don’t be a deckhead”…

cheschire• 2 years ago

Meh.

What’s the meeting about? That’s the more important question.

Is this a decision making meeting? Is there one person making the decision or several?

Is this instead informational in nature? Are people supposed to understand the gist from this and do deeper research afterwards? Or should they come to the presentation already informed in some way?

PowerPoint is primarily a method for the speaker to organize their story, and secondarily for the audience to have visual landmarks to aid memory.

If you do anything else, you’re probably not planning your meetings properly.

MathMonkeyMan• 2 years ago

I can put together a good powerpoint presentation -- one that isn't just bullet points and fluff.

It takes me forever. It's like preparing for a talk at a tech conference. I spend hours and hours off the clock refining the slides, the script, and rehearsing the timing.

Nobody's going to put in that effort if they have to present multiple times per quarter, especially if they know that nobody cares and that it doesn't really matter anyway.

EdwardCoffin• 2 years ago

Neal Stephenson has a funny anecdote about explaining PowerPoint to a friend of his who had managed to be unaware of it until now, culminating in Stephenson's explanation "for people who can't communicate, it's what a dialysis machine is for people who don't have kidneys" [1].

This is the culmination of his response [2] to a question [3] in the Q&A period of a talk on his book tour for Seveneves [4]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIHF6vDv8AE#t=40m20s

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIHF6vDv8AE#t=38m46s

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIHF6vDv8AE#t=38m06s

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIHF6vDv8AE

thom• 2 years ago

Slides are cursed with multiple audiences and lifetimes. After an initial persuasive speech, perhaps some new initiative gains momentum, and the slides are often the first and only relic associated with The Project for quite some time. They are a cultural artifact onto which many beliefs, hopes and dreams are projected in ways that are not at all evident from their content. Minions are asked by their managers if this thing is actually possible or desirable. Vendors are asked to pitch in. If you’re very unlucky you’re asked to start estimating for the thing and you’re sat, puzzled, thinking “but this is just some bullet points?” Sometimes the detail only comes later once things are signed off and someone is made accountable, and it’s that poor soul’s job to go back and find out exactly what gaps everyone has filled in inside their heads.

I don’t actually think PowerPoint is responsible for all this, I think it’s just people are often too lazy to create more structure and depth at the right time, and transition to something else.

zero_k• 2 years ago

This is by Edward Tufte. If you haven't had the chance to check out Edward Tufte's other works, in particular, the Visual Display of Quantitative Information [1] then I highly suggest you do. Every time I see a horrible graphic in a research paper, I redirect authors to [1]. It ought to be a must-read for anyone wanting to create a graph. Seriously, if you intend to display information, read that book. It'll open your eyes to make you see the immense amount of waste of space and clutter that people introduce.

It's basically an ode to clear, cutter-less, data visualization. Check out this timetable [2] (horizontal lines: stations, vertical lines: hours, diagonal lines: trains), and your mind will be blown. It's compact, it gives you all the information you need, it can be navigated by your grandma (or your granddaughter) and it likely shows more information than most digital or paper-based system you have ever met, in a smaller format.

[1] https://www.edwardtufte.com/book/the-visual-display-of-quant... [2] https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/0*8zW...

apwheele• 2 years ago

I feel the same way, and a good follow up book about more general communication is Trees, maps and theorems by Doumont, https://andrewpwheeler.com/2016/12/05/review-of-trees-maps-a...

That said, I think it is possible my refusal to do cheeky ppt slides with smart art and fill them with graphs of real data instead has stunted my career growth into management.

greentxt3• 2 years ago

One problem with both of these takes on powerpoint is they assume it will be presented in person. That's less often the case now. People present more often via teams or zoom and so a lot of the ideas (don't expect people to read and listen simultaneously) are not accurate anymore (half your viewers are audio only, more people get copies of the slides than make the original presentation). Remote vs in person are totally different beasts.

Closi• 2 years ago

While this criticises PowerPoint - I don't think it sufficiently outlines an alternative.

As someone that has tried to write a decision paper before rather than a PowerPoint deck, I found the main challenge was engagement (i.e. encouraging people to read it is a challenge, while a powerpoint can be walked through together).

I could present a spreadsheet, but that only addresses the financials or numbers and won't address the business context.

And if you go into a board meeting empty handed to talk about a large investment - good luck!

I think it's probably a case of horses-for-courses: Sometimes PowerPoint is a great format, other times it might not be, and like any format it can either be used well or poorly. The issue in the Columbia example wasn't PowerPoint per-se, it was that the managers weren't clear in their communication.

And while bullet points are poor in some ways - they are great in others. Distilling ideas down and making sure your list is MECE is part of clear communication and thinking.

ghaff• 2 years ago

I pretty much agree with all that.

I'd add that you tend to need a presentation and a leave-behind format. And, in the real world, it's mostly not realistic to expect people to create both formats. Mostly. I've actually given a presentation and wrote a book on the topic. But I'm not going to do that routinely.

nwhatt• 2 years ago

I once had a great presentation about this very topic!

The presenter gave us both the Tufte book and a detailed handout.

The idea is that you use the PowerPoint like you would an overhead projector, details that would otherwise be on slides are better as a handout that people can read/annotate as they want.

This was part of a summer REU and focused on academic talks, and this all falls apart in a remote setting - but I think there are ways to capture the essence of this style on Zoom.

ssivark3• 2 years ago

How about Amazon style meetings with 4-6 page memos?

The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]

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