criticism of PowerPoint

This comes from wikipedia:

One major source of criticism of PowerPoint comes from Yale professor of statistics and graphic design Edward Tufte, who criticizes many emergent properties of the software:

Its use to guide and reassure a presenter, rather than to enlighten the audience;

Unhelpfully simplistic tables and charts, resulting from the low resolution of computer displays;

The outliner causing ideas to be arranged in an unnecessarily deep hierarchy, itself subverted by the need to restate the hierarchy on each slide;

Enforcement of the audience's linear progression through that hierarchy (whereas with handouts, readers could browse and relate items at their leisure);

Poor typography and chart layout, from presenters who are poor designers and who use poorly designed templates and default settings;

Simplistic thinking, from ideas being squashed into bulleted lists, and stories with beginning, middle, and end being turned into a collection of disparate, loosely disguised points. This may present a kind of image of objectivity and neutrality that people associate with science, technology, and "bullet points".

Tufte's criticism of the use of PowerPoint has extended to its use by NASA engineers in the events leading to the Columbia disaster. Tufte's analysis of a representative NASA PowerPoint slide is included in a full page sidebar entitled "Engineering by Viewgraphs" in Volume 1 of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board's report.

Critics of the prewar planning by the U.S. Department of Defense prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 also point to a reliance on PowerPoint presentations as a poor alternative to traditional military briefing methods. A report issued by The National Security Archive at George Washington University in February 2007 released declassified PowerPoint slides relating to prewar assumptions and also criticized the reliance on PowerPoint itself as a presentation medium. The report included quotes from two senior officers regarding PowerPoint:

Lt. Gen. McKiernan later told Washington Post reporter Thomas E. Ricks (Fiasco, p. 75):

"It's quite frustrating the way this works, but the way we do things nowadays is combatant commanders brief their products in PowerPoint up in Washington to OSD and Secretary of Defense... In lieu of an order, or a frag [fragmentary] order, or plan, you get a set of PowerPoint slides... [T]hat is frustrating, because nobody wants to plan against PowerPoint slides."

Retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich told Ricks (Fiasco, pp. 75-76) that PowerPoint war planning was the ultimate insult:

"Here may be the clearest manifestation of OSD's [Office of Secretary of Defense] contempt for the accumulated wisdom of the military profession and of the assumption among forward thinkers that technology -- above all information technology -- has rendered obsolete the conventions traditionally governing the preparation and conduct of war. To imagine that PowerPoint slides can substitute for such means is really the height of recklessness."