PowerPoint - Cause of the Shuttle Columbia disaster.

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board at NASA issued a report in August, identifying causes of the accident. The primary one, of course, was the insulating foam on the external fuel tank. But, according to the report, a secondary cause of the accident was PowerPoint; specifically, NASA's use of presenting complex information via PowerPoint, instead of traditional technical reports. The engineers' findings on their assessment of wing damage was presented in a confusing, crammed-full PowerPoint slide that was difficult to read and did not satisfactorily convey the information that there was a life-threatening situation.

The article goes on to talk about the claim that Edward Tufte - a theorist of information presentation - made, that PowerPoint forces people to mutilate and overly simplify data. A chart in the Wall Street Journal, for instance, would have an average of 120 elements while a typical chart in PowerPoint has only 12 elements.

My complaint with how PowerPoint is often used is that it ends up containing all the information the speaker is trying to present, instead of providing a framework to tie the speaker's points together. When PowerPoint is used as the repository of all the information in the presentation, it no longer functions effectively as a presentation tool. (When you're busy reading the presentation slides, you're not paying attention to the presenter, and you lose any information or nuances not contained in the slide.) The culture at one of my recent employers was such that only PowerPoint was used to transfer or retain information, and there was no central library or database to keep PowerPoint "decks". And since it was also a culture that encouraged rapid transfer, promotion, and re-organization, that information quickly became lost, and new people in a position had to recreate the lessons learned by previous employees. The few presentations I did there, I tried to use my PowerPoint slides as the focus for my presentation, and not as the encyclopedia with all of my information, but eventually my supervisor's wishes carried the day (and turned my slides into unmanageable messes).