Obama: PowerPoint vs Talking Good

I admit it. I was an early PowerPoint Ph.D. in my career, at one point thinking primarily through PowerPoint. There has been a big backlash in the last few years as the application has become ubiquitous in corporate meetings.

Here is a good example of the data contraction ills of PowerPoint vs the elegance and power of talking. The first is an eleven slide pitch prepared by Peter Abilla and discussed on schmula.

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Well done, sir. On a side note, if you've never looked at the work of Edward Tufte, you're really missing out on something. He's one of the world's leaders in visual presentation of information. I've had his book, "Visual Display of Quantitative Data," for several years. Amazon.com named it one of the best 100 books of the 20th Century, which is a pretty nice endorsement (btw, I couldn't find such a list via Google...).

And with that, I signed up for his course in the ATL on Tuesday. I didn't realize he was in town, so I'm pretty excited to do this. I miss formal education from my days in Corporate America. Trip report to follow. You can find a podcast from NPR with Tufte here.