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"According to Tufte, PowerPoint assaults intelligence in a number of insidious ways. Among PowerPoint's sins: It locks presenters into a linear, slide-by-slide format that discourages free association and creative thinking. It imposes artificial and potentially misleading hierarchies on information. (A key bullet point indicating the abnormally large size of the foam chunk that damaged Columbia's tiles, causing it to crash, was relegated to the bottom of a crucial NASA slide, in small type.) It breaks information and data into fragments, making it more difficult to see the logical relationships between different sets of data. It encourages over-simplification by asking presenters to summarize key concepts in as few words as possible – e.g., bullet points – which can lead to gross generalizations, imprecise logic, superficial reasoning and, quite often, misleading conclusions. It imposes an authoritarian presenter/audience relationship rather than facilitating a give-and-take exchange of ideas and information. It encourages what Tufte calls "chartjunk" and "PowerPointPhluff" – i.e., uninformative or gratuitous graphics. And, above all, PowerPoint makes the people who use it look stupid.

Enemy of narrative, friend of incoherence, PowerPoint imposes "an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch," Tufte claims. Furthermore, "PowerPoint will not do for serious presentations," he says – and any "serious person" who uses it runs the risk of, well, not being taken seriously.

Such criticisms of PowerPoint are not new. That PowerPoint slides can be simple-minded and dull is no great revelation. Tufte's contribution is to explain why, and to do it in such a damning, vitriolic way that curious people who don't normally read polemics on data design are suddenly paying attention. Tufte also takes the unprecedented step of asserting that a world of ideas shared primarily by PowerPoint slides isn't just boring, it's dangerous."

Taken from Does PowerPoint Make You Stupid? by Tad Simons for Presentations.com