I've been thinking a lot about how much I hate PowerPoint lately, particularly for representing vast amounts of data. It turns out I'm not alone. Written in September of 2003, the master of the graphical representation of data, Edward Tufte, wrote an article pointing out the same failings that occur when relying on PowerPoint to convey extremely incoherent sets of data, their inter-relationships and the conclusions to be drawn from the data sets. In the Q&A section of Tufte's site, Dr. Tufte points out how the investigation board of the Columbia accident noted that many of the briefing slides didn't convey the risks of the dangers caused by the foam insulation falling off the External Tank of the shuttle launch vehicle. I am absolutely fascinated by the quality of the graphical representation of the data in the final report by the investigation board. Take note of the fact there is almost no way to represent this in view graphs.
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"Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest."
