Is PowerPoint a moral issue?

In reference to an article by Edward Tufte titled PowerPoint Is Evil, (yes that's the title and the sub-head is "Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely"), Signal + Noise writes here:

For the record, I don't use or particularly like PowerPoint; my particular disorder leads me to spend hours of my life creating my own formatting tools in the interest of total aesthetic control. (Coming soon to this blog; I've been restraining myself.) So being rather obsessive on the subject myself and in general agreement with him, I am naturally among Tufte's most sympathetic audience. But he loses me a bit on this one.

Loses me, too. People write dumb things with pens. PowerPoint  is a tool. One can misuse a tool and maybe lots of people are mis-using PowerPoint. So the answer is to give them better training, not to destroy the tool itself. No? I have never actually used PowerPoint; the few and boring lectures I have heard which did use it were boring because of, I always assumed, the lecturer, not the lectern, so to speak. Tufte offers an example:

Consider an important and intriguing table of survival rates for those with cancer relative to those without cancer for the same time period. Some 196 numbers and 57 words describe survival rates and their standard errors for 24 cancers. Applying the PowerPoint templates to this nice, straightforward table yields an analytical disaster. (italics added - DS) The data explodes into six separate chaotic slides, consuming 2.9 times the area of the table. Everything is wrong with these smarmy, incoherent graphs: the encoded legends, the meaningless color, the logo-type branding. They are uncomparative, indifferent to content and evidence, and so data-starved as to be almost pointless. Chartjunk is a clear sign of statistical stupidity. Poking a finger into the eye of thought, these data graphics would turn into a nasty travesty if used for a serious purpose, such as helping cancer patients assess their survival chances. To sell a product that messes up data with such systematic intensity, Microsoft abandons any pretense of statistical integrity and reasoning.

If it weren't so expensive I'd go buy a copy of PowerPoint (though Apple's Keynote is 20% of the price and 95% of the functionality, I gather) to see what Tufte is talking about.

But something sounds funny. Can't you place the table in its original form (as Tufte shows it in the article) into PowerPoint directly? Is one forced or even encouraged to place it in the manner shown as the bad examples? Tufte's last sentence is puzzling: "To sell a product that messes up data with such systematic intensity, Microsoft abandons any pretense of statistical integrity and reasoning."

I played with PowerPoint for an afternoon (I never did use it in the presentation) and it seemed simply to be a page layout program for the screen. Just as one can produce a lousy (or great) book with Pagemaker, one can produce, I would think, a lousy (or great) screen presentation with PowerPoint. No? Tufte writes: "Applying the PowerPoint templates to this nice, straightforward table yields an analytical disaster." Is it a requirement to apply and use the PowerPoint templates?

PowerPoint will accept one's own graphics; I imported images and they seemed to work fine. So maybe the problem is simply misuse of a new medium? Of course that is not an inflammatory point for a lecture.

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UPDATE 12/21/03 : See also Crooked Timber: PowerPoint .