In many organizations, the beginning and end of any business activity is marked by the PowerPoint presentation. In the early stages of an initiative, PowerPoint is used in strategy sessions, to present proposals and put forth plans. Later, it’s used for updates and progress reports. In the final stages, it’s used to report back and to present findings and conclusions. PowerPoint is everywhere, and it shows no signs of going away anytime soon.

Why is it used so broadly? And how did this simple tool become so entrenched in business? Here are a few thoughts:

1. PowerPoint is accessible. For the novice, it’s easy to learn and use.
2. PowerPoint is everywhere. Pretty much everyone has it, or has the ability to view a file. This makes it easy to share ideas and generally move meaning around. Slides can be borrowed, stolen, recycled and re-used.
3. PowerPoint is flexible. The same document that is used to present information in a meeting or conference, can, with little or no modification, be emailed as a document or shared online, retaining much of its meaning.
4. PowerPoint is easy to read. PowerPoint documents can be scanned and understood more rapidly than text documents. Because they are primarily visual they tend to be more easily understood and remembered.
5. PowerPoint is modular. It can be broken down into single slides, which can be arranged and rearranged into numerous different sequences. Over time you can build up a storehouse of slides that represent your – or your team’s – collective knowledge about any subject, which can be distributed, shared, discussed and modified as things evolve over time.
6. PowerPoint is powerful. For the more experienced user, it’s a powerful multimedia tool, with animation and other advanced effects. It’s easy to add information of any kind: Video, charts, photographs, maps – just about anything that can be digitized can be added to PowerPoint.

People use PowerPoint to represent knowledge, and the main element is relatively small and useful atomic unit we call the slide.

So what’s the problem?
“Death by PowerPoint” is the popular term for the much-dreaded meeting where a presenter subjects his audience to slide after slide, each one densely packed with bullet points or complex, confusing information, leaving the audience bored, frustrated confused.

But PowerPoint is not the enemy. When used appropriately, slides, and short sequences of slides, are excellent tools to represent knowledge. A good slide contains visual and verbal information in equal measure, and as an “information container,” a slide is just about the perfect size for memory and retention: big enough to hold meaningful information, but not so big that it’s likely to become overwhelming. A well-designed slide – one that’s comfortable to view and read – holds just about the same amount of information that you can hold in your short-term memory.

The problem is much, much deeper than PowerPoint. The issue is this: PowerPoint is a visual tool, and we are a visually illiterate society.

What do I mean by this?
In the modern world we are constantly confronted – you might say bombarded – with visual information: Television and film are the primary culprits, followed closely by billboards, brochures, and, yes, bullet points. Advertisers have long known that visualizing an idea is one of the quickest and most reliable ways to insert it into a human brain.

Due to this visual assault, we have, over time, become more sophisticated in our reading of visual information. In a world where information is digital, where photos can be altered in Photoshop and where films can show impossible things like dinosaurs and talking animals with a high degree of realism, we understand that seeing is no longer believing.

But this kind of visual sophistication is not literacy. Literacy is the ability to both read and write. If a child could read written language but not write it – if he could read a mathematical equation but not perform such operations himself – then we would not consider him prepared for success in the world.

In our school systems we teach our children the three R’s – reading, writing and arithmetic, because we believe them to be fundamental skills for successful integration in society. But the three R’s are no longer enough. Our world is changing fast – faster than we can keep up with our historical modes of thinking and communicating. Visual literacy – the ability to both read and write visual information; the ability to learn visually; to think and solve problems in the visual domain – will, as the information revolution evolves, become a requirement for success in business and in life.

PowerPoint has risen to its current position for two reasons:

1. We’re processing more information than ever before, at unprecedented volumes
2. We don’t have as much time to read anymore, and
3. Much of the information we need to share is non-linear in nature.

PowerPoint is a visual medium. If you want to convey information visually, it’s the most accessible and ubiquitous tool there is. The answer to bad PowerPoint is not to eliminate the tool, but to improve our visual literacy. We need to teach visual literacy in our schools, and to our business people. We need an ABC book of visual language (a project I am working on).

We’re leaving an industrial age and entering an information age, yet we continue to teach, and operate our schools, as if they were factories. In an information age, visually literate societies will succeed and thrive. Shouldn’t we be one of them?

Here’s what the experts say:

The case for evil:
Edward Tufte, information design expert and author of several books on the subject, recently wrote an article excoriating PowerPoint in Wired magazine, entitled PowerPoint is Evil. In it, Tufte compared PowerPoint to tools of propaganda and control:

“PowerPoint’s pushy style seeks to set up a speaker’s dominance over the audience. The speaker, after all, is making power points with bullets to followers. Could any metaphor be worse? Voicemail menu systems? Billboards? Television? Stalin?”

He goes on to make the argument that statistical data should be presented in one slide as opposed to several:

“When information is stacked in time, it is difficult to understand context and evaluate relationships. Visual reasoning usually works more effectively when relevant information is shown side by side. Often, the more intense the detail, the greater the clarity and understanding. This is especially so for statistical data, where the fundamental analytical act is to make comparisons.”

The case for good:
Donald A. Norman, former Apple Fellow and author of The Design of Everyday Things, responds in defense of PowerPoint:

“Tufte is a statistician and I suspect that for him, nothing could be more delightful than a graph or chart which can capture the interest for hours, where each new perusal yields even more information. I agree that this is a marvelous outcome, but primarily for readers, for people sitting in comfortable chairs, with good light and perhaps a writing pad. For people with a lot of time to spend, to think, to ponder. This is not what happens within a talk. Present a rich and complex slide and the viewer is lost. By the time they have figured out the slide, the speaker is off on some other topic.”

PowerPoint, true to its name, is a powerful tool. It can be used for good or evil and it can certainly be misused. Abuse of the tool is so common that it has become synonymous with the tool itself: Peter Norvig’s excellent satire, The Gettysburg Address as a PowerPoint Presentation, makes the case especially well.

But who’s to blame?
Should we condemn the tool because people misuse it? We can’t in good conscience blame the tool or the well-intentioned people who try to use it. They are simply following the guidelines, templates and wizards within PowerPoint.

“Wait a second!” you say. If PowerPoint is neither good nor evil, and the people who use it have good intentions and are trying their best, why are there so many terrible PowerPoints out there? Who’s fault is it?

It’s the wizards.

The wizards and templates within PowerPoint lead us astray. PowerPoint is a visual tool, yet the default setup is text with bullet points. Most of the “design” templates are cluttered or badly designed. The content wizards serve up bland, bullet-point-ridden generic outlines and seem to “autochoose” the ugliest design templates available.

They coach us towards bullet points, chartjunk, “meeting by template” and a thousand other “deaths by PowerPoint.” Microsoft makes great tools but when they try to deliver content they seem to fail. A more successful strategy seems to be partnering with content providers as they did with MSNBC.

Wizards, like consultants, come in all flavors, and the ones that dwell in PowerPoint are particularly capricious and not to be trusted. Follow their advice at your peril.

How do you feel about PowerPoint? How do you feel about the wizards? Please share your thoughts.