PowerPoint Makes You Dumb

My dis­like for Pow­er­Point is vindicated:

Pow­er­Point Makes You Dumb

In August, the Colum­bia Acci­dent Inves­ti­ga­tion Board at NASA released Vol­ume 1 of its report on why the space shut­tle crashed. As expect­ed, the ship’s foam insu­la­tion was the main cause of the dis­as­ter. But the board also fin­gered anoth­er unusu­al cul­prit: Pow­er­Point, Microsoft­’s well-known “slide­ware” program. 

NASA, the board argued, had become too reliant on pre­sent­ing com­plex infor­ma­tion via Pow­er­Point, instead of by means of tra­di­tion­al ink-and-paper tech­ni­cal reports. When NASA engi­neers assessed pos­si­ble wing dam­age dur­ing the mis­sion, they pre­sent­ed the find­ings in a con­fus­ing Pow­er­Point slide—so crammed with nest­ed bul­let points and irreg­u­lar short forms that it was near­ly impos­si­ble to untan­gle. “It is easy to under­stand how a senior man­ag­er might read this Pow­er­Point slide and not real­ize that it address­es a life-threat­en­ing sit­u­a­tion,” the board stern­ly noted. 

(much more at the site, which requires free registration)