Dr. Edward Tufte has published an essay on The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, [1] in which he blames PowerPoint's ready-made templates for astonishingly thin, nearly content-free briefings. Such slideware, he says, helps speakers to replace serious analysis with chart junk, overproduced layouts, cheerleader logotypes and branding, and corny clip art. He has coined the phrase PowerPoint Phluff to describe this phenomenon. Dr. Tufte writes about what not to do and provides suggestions on giving PowerPoint-free presentations. And in the postscript to his essay, he states "I can recommend three books on how to present visual evidence!"-no doubt referring to the Tufte-authored: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, [2] Envisioning Information, [3] and Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. [4] As an admirer of Dr. Tufte and someone who agrees with much of his essay, I propose to suggest some ways to improve PowerPoint presentations for engineers and scientists.(12).
