Why Romney is Unfit to be President

A very funny opinion piece by Ruth Marcus in the Post about why Mitt Romney should not be president. It is because he uses Powerpoint. Here’s part of her reasoning:

It’s just that I loathe PowerPoint. Enduring a PowerPoint presentation is rarely informative and never efficient. The inevitable cutesy graphics — why think through a tough problem when you can spend your time surfing for clip art or experimenting with fonts? — add a bullet point of insult to the injury of having to sit though it.

I completely agree with her. I can’t stand the program. And I really can’t stand it when people want to take a presentation and put it in print. I do desktop publishing and I cannot tell you the number of times in the past 15 plus years people have come along with PowerPoint slides they want to include in a book or newsletter or report. In the beginning, PowerPoint slides were next to useless. In print they looked like absolute crap. Over time that has changed. Mostly because now you can make them into PDFs and then import the PDF into your print file. They still don’t look great but they look a great deal better than they once did.

A little more from the column:

Yale University political scientist Edward Tufte, in a 2003 Wired magazine article, “PowerPoint Is Evil,” compared PowerPoint to a prescription drug that “induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication.”

One more bit:

It is difficult to capture the graphical inanity in words, but here is the slide that purports to show the different goals of “Obamacare” and “Mass-Care.” Under the first header: “A government takeover of health care.” Under the second: “Help people get and keep their health insurance.” Well, that settles it, no?

Finally here’s a link to a famous address by a president done in PowerPoint.