Should PowerPoint be banned?

A Swiss political party, the Anti-PowerPoint movement, wants to ban the presentation tool.

News.com.au reports that, “According to the party’s founder, Matthias Poehm, PowerPoint teaches people very little and actually alienates audiences from the presentation.”

“Mr Poehm estimates that Switzerland could save up to 350 billion euros ($479 billion) a year by banishing the software and going retro,” the report continues.

Mr Poehm believes that, in addition to the cost, PowerPoint is an impediment to healthy and instructive debates and discussions.

Mr Poehm is far from alone.

“In academic circles, perhaps the most influential and respected critic is Yale Professor Edward Tufte. In The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, he offers a sophisticated and nuanced critique. His focus is mainly on the program’s templates, which, he contends, erode verbal, visual, and statistical analysis,” says a study by the American Historical Association.

“Nearly all engineering presentations at NASA are made in PowerPoint. Is this a product endorsement or a big mistake? Does PP’s cognitive style affect the quality of engineering analysis? How does PP compare with alternative methods of technical presentation?”, were some of the questions asked by Edward Tufte while criticising PowerPoint .

If Tufte was a detractor of PowerPoint, there are many detractors of Tufte. “Tufte misses the point completely. His famous denunciation of the NASA slides, where he points out that critical information was buried, is not a denunciation of PowerPoint, as he claims. The point was buried because the presenters did not think it important. They were wrong, but it is always easier to find blame in hindsight than with foresight. The slides matched their understanding of the importance of the issues,” says Don Norman in an interview on PowerPoint Useability to sociablemedia.com.

“Tufte is criticising the symptom. Tufte has politicised this to benefit his seminars - but the correct culprit is the erroneous analysis of the tests, not the way the engineers decided to present it to their audience,” continues Norman.

The world is obviously divided into those who support PowerPoint, those who castigate it and those who have no position on the tool.

But, as Shashi Tharoor lost his job thanks to Twitter , there are others who have been victims of PowerPoint. “Col Lawrence Sellin, a 61-year-old Army reservist, has been dismissed from his post in headquarters with NATO’s International Security Assistance Force less than 48 hours after he published an op-ed, via UPI, complaining that the “war consists largely of the endless tinkering with PowerPoint slides to conform with the idiosyncrasies of cognitively challenged generals in order to spoon-feed them information,” reports Wired magazine .

Perhaps Col Sellin’s view is one that resonates with many. The amount of time spent first creating a PowerPoint presentation and then scheduling a meeting for the recipients of the presentation and then, finally, making the presentation (and all that it entails: a conference room, projector, snacks, etc) seem to be such a criminal waste of time - especially when, in most instances, a face-to-face meeting or a simple gathering over a round table would have done the job just as well.

What’s your take on PowerPoint? Do you feel, as Poehm does, that it deserves to be banned? Do you find it a profitable tool? Do you just not care? Use the comments box below to share your views and ignite a debate.