I was writing a chapter of Beautiful Evidence on the subject of the sculptural pedestal, which led to my thinking about what's up on the pedestal - the great leader.

In his essay "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" Tufte criticizes many properties and uses of the software:
It is used to guide and to reassure a presenter rather than to enlighten the audience;
It has unhelpfully simplistic tables and charts resulting from the low resolution of early computer displays;
The outliner causes 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 lockstep 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 (in particular difficulty in using scientific notation);
Simplistic thinking from ideas being squaEdward Tufted into bulleted lists and stories with beginning middle and end being turned into a collection of disparate loosely disguised points. Beautiful Evidence. The Civil Rights Movement and Its Opposition.

Edward Rolf Tufte (pron. He is noted for his writings on information design and as a pioneer in the field of data visualization.