Thursday June 24, 2004

Edward Tufte Today I attended a course by Edward Tufte in Portland. What can I say but it will change the way you look at presentations for ever more. I don't know if this is true across all organisations but I suspect that the all too ubiquitous "Power Point" style presentation, has in the last couple of years resulted in bad decisions being made in the company. It's just my opinion but after attending this course I can definitely see how inappropriate and limiting the "Cognitive Style of Power Point" or Office presentations is. Why should you limit yourself to 6 words per line and 6 lines per slide, just because you have to project it onto a wall. Just write a doucment and include the data and text in context and discuss that instead. At least you can say what you really want to say rather than having to dumb it down for the sake of the medium. One of the many lucid and common sense points he makes is don't let the mdeium dictate the content. If you've worked hard to analyse some data, and have a good story to tell, why spoil it will a presentation when you could write a real story in a document. You can write complete sentences to explain yourself, as opposed to half baked one liners and annotate data clearly. Ever felt like you never really got to the point cos you couldn;t fit it on a slide in a big enough font to make it legible and then decided to leave it out!

Edward Tufte'sWeb page is definitely worth visiting and the course at $320 is possibly the best value day's training I have had at Sun in a long time. You get three first rate hard back (value $150), content heavy books, about his work and the pleasure of listening to a very fine presenter educate/teach you about the content.

I feel like a changed man and I don't say that lightly. (2004-06-24 20:10:59.0) Permalink Comments [2]