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Anyone remember that article in Wired w/David Byrne and Edward Tufte's take on PPT? Would make a nice triptych with this posting.

"Learning to Love PowerPoint

We interrupt this magazine for a PowerPoint presentation:

• For artist and musician David Byrne, the medium is the message.

• Infographic guru Edward Tufte wants to kill the messenger."

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt1.html

— Kelvy Bird

Resources for improving PowerPoint at Working Smart.
http://www.michaelhyatt.com/workingsmart/2004/06/my_favorite_pow.html

— Peter Durand

From art director Bo Maupin:

Some great quotes on my favorite “design” tool – PowerPointless® (http://powerpointless.com/). Everyone from David Byrne to Edward Tufte:

"Despite the level of cadet complaints about the 'Death by PowerPointí phenomena, I have found that they (cadets) are quite willing to inflict this upon their colleagues."

- LTC J.B., USMA Faculty

"PowerPoint presentations are a new form of anesthesia and torture. They were even used at the Abu Ghraib Prison."

- Anonymous

"His knowledge on that topic is only PowerPoint deep."

- MAJ (JS)

"PPT is a triumph of process over product.† Knowing what you are doing is more important than getting the right answer."

- Tom Lehrer

"I recently exchanged comments with someone on a similar briefing (earlier version?). I told him that Power Point briefings do nothing but obfuscate. If you cannot explain what you are doing in three pages of text, you are BSing. That's what the slide show is: BS."

- Senior Army Officer

"The genius of it is that it was designed for any idiot to use. I learned it in a few hours."

- David Byrne, formerly of the Talking Heads

"Power corrupts and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."

- Vint Cerf, Internet pioneer

"My belief is that PowerPoint doesn't kill meetings. People kill meetings."

- Peter Norvig, Google, Inc.

"Using PowerPoint is like having a loaded AK-47 on the table: You can do very bad things with it."

- Peter Norvig

"If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won't make them relevant."

- Edward Tufte, Professor Emeritus, Yale University

"PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play - very loud, very slow, and very simple."

- Edward Tufte

"PowerPoint is designed for making a slide show a little more attractive with images and text that move, but when an idiot makes them all move, interest is lost."

- Anonymous

"You can't speak with the U.S. military without knowing PowerPoint."

- Margaret Hayes, National Defense University

"Shelton's order is only the Pentagon's most recent assault on a growing electronic menace: the PowerPoint briefing."

- Anonymous

"The idea behind most of these briefings is for us to sit through 100 slides with our eyes glazed over, and then to do what all military organizations hope for ... to surrender to an overwhelming mass."

- Richard Danzig, Navy Secretary

"Navy Secretary Danzig announced late last year that he was no longer willing to soldier through the slide shows. He maintains that PowerPoint briefings are only necessary for two reasons: If field conditions are changing rapidly or if the audience is 'functionally illiterate.'"

- Anonymous

"The PowerPoint syndrome isnít just the misuse of specific technology. Itís a cultural disease."

- Giancarlo Livraghi

"We had 12.9 gigabytes of (Microsoft) PowerPoint slides on our network. And I thought, 'What a huge waste of corporate productivity.' So we banned it. And we've had three unbelievable record-breaking fiscal quarters since we banned PowerPoint. Now, I would argue that every company in the world, if they would just ban PowerPoint, would see their earnings skyrocket. Employees would stand around going, 'What do I do? Guess I've got to go to work.'"

- Scott McNealy

Sun Microsystems, quoted in the San Jose Mercury News, January 27, 1997

"Funny. I always thought that PowerPoint was already at least as destructive as macro viruses to corporate productivity. You ever watch a suit fiddle with his presentation?"

- CmdrTaco

"One of the criticisms that's been raised about PowerPoint is that it can give the illusion of coherence and content when there really isn't very much coherence or content."

- Edward Miller

"At a place like IBM, there's an infinite world of products that you can create. But, too often, management would say, "Great, you big-idea guys, go go go." But then they give all the money to the people who control the revenue streams, the people with the overhead projectors and PowerPoint slides."

- Ted Selker

"Flash is the PowerPoint of the internet."

- Anonymous

"My plan for improving the quality of presentations used to be two-fold: DESTROY EVERY COPY OF POWERPOINT (and assorted functional clones) in existence, and GIVE OFFENDERS REMEDIAL "HOW TO TALK" CLASSES, emphasizing the content-based logical mark-up portions of HTML as a mechanism for making slides. (The hardcore hopeless cases would be forced to learn TeX.)"

- John S. Jacobs Anderson

"The 'PowerPoint syndrome' is a well known disease, clearly diagnosed not only by brilliant cartoonists such as Scott Adams, but also in a variety of analyses of corporate efficiency and communication. Itís called 'disinfotainment.'"

- Giancarlo Livraghi

Compiled by Jack Placke. You can find more PowerPoint humor at Jack's site PowerPoint Pogue's: http://www.nbc-links.com/powerpoint.html

— Peter Durand