As I’ve said in the past, I’m not a big fan of PowerPoint, and one of my biggest beefs is the fact that it’s a lousy data-transfer mechanism — try recreating a narrative from a PowerPoint that you didn’t author sometime, and you’ll see what I mean.

Now, the Los Angeles Times is reporting that investigators of Columbia crash are encountering the same thing. The story ends thusly:

When accident investigators sought out a report documenting details of the shuttle’s design or performance, they often found only PowerPoint presentations.

Without the knowledgeable voice of the engineers who had originally presented them, the slides were meaningless.

The board’s investigators soon coined a phrase for this new institutional amnesia.

“Death by PowerPoint.”

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