'It has happened to us all. You are sitting in a PowerPoint presentation trying - and probably failing - not to yawn as slide after slide flashes across the screen.

You may blame your boredom on the speaker, but Edward Tufte has another explanation. Microsoft PowerPoint, he believes, is a badly designed medium for communicating the information people need to make informed decisions. That is why it is so dull.



...Whether or not you agree with him, Tufte cannot be dismissed as a crank who has endured one too many PowerPoint presentations. He is professor emeritus at Yale University, where he taught statistical evidence, analytical design and political economy, and the author of a series of influential books on the history of information design. The latest addition to the series, "Beautiful Evidence," is the product of nine years of research and writing in which Tufte applies many of his ideas about good - and bad - information design to the presentation of evidence, which he defines as "information used to explain something accurately."



...Tufte is an eccentric figure, who founded his own publishing house, Graphics Press, in the leafy Connecticut town of Cheshire, where he lives, rather than conform to the conventions of the publishing industry. The cover of "Beautiful Evidence" features photographs of his golden retriever, Max, diving, even though they are not discussed in the book. He has his critics; notably the digital design lobby, which has accused Tufte of being overcritical of computer-based design, although he doesn't seem to be any less scathing about shoddy design in print.

Entertaining as Tufte's tirades can be, the charm of his books is in his skill at identifying inspiring examples of good design, often in the least likely places. He is as excited by an intelligently designed railway timetable or police instruction manual as by an exquisite 16th-century Albrecht Dürer engraving. "Beautiful Evidence" is crammed with his discoveries.


...Tufte's own contribution to evidence design is the sparkline, a combination of words and graphs that illustrates complex changes over time. In "Beautiful Evidence" he contrasts the clarity of the sparkline, and his other exemplars, with poor evidence design.

One of his targets is Alfred Barr, the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the chart he drew to illustrate the development of Cubism and Abstraction with arrows indicating the influence of one artistic movement on another, such as constructivism on the Bauhaus. Tufte suggests that by adding double-headed arrows, Barr could have presented a fuller picture that would have allowed for the interchange of ideas.

But his prime target is Microsoft PowerPoint, the subject of an entire chapter titled "Pitching Out Corrupts Within." He rails against what he calls PP Phluff, the frames and logos that tend to clutter PowerPoint slides. But rather than simply attacking PowerPoint, Tufte has analyzed its shortcomings. The crux of his argument is that a PowerPoint slide is so much lower in resolution than paper or the computer screen that too little information can be included. An average PowerPoint slide contains 40 words, whereas people typically read 300 to 1,000 words a minute. No wonder we are bored.

Tufte reckons that the bottom 10 percent of speakers probably benefit from using PowerPoint because it at least "forces them to have points," and that the top 10 percent are able to overcome its limitations. As for the remaining 80 percent, he suggests that these speakers print their thoughts on paper handouts instead.'