Powerpoint Engineering

Powerpoint engineering at its finest (from NASAWatch).

Powerpoint Engineering (also called Viewgraph Engineering) is a favorite activity of aerospace engineers at NASA. This activity involves the creation of Powerpoint slides, instead of properly documenting technical work (or as a substitute for doing actual work in the first place). The greatest practitioners of this art form are able to produce mind-numbing charts that make absolutely no sense, but are nevertheless used to influence national space policy. In modern times, Powerpoint engineering has replaced actual engineering at most NASA centers.

Elements

Key elements of Powerpoint engineering slides include:

• Crappy line drawings
• Hi-resolution graphics (usually obtained from Google image search)
• Acronyms that aren't explained
• As many different font sizes as possible
• Matlab plots with microscopic axis labels
• English units ([feet per second]], pound mass, etc.)

Examples

• Human Exploration Framework Team Presentation
• Human Space Exploration Framework Summary
• Designing Human Exploration Missions
• Cross Cutting Activities

Trivia

• In olden days, engineers would write full reports to document technical work. Many of these historical documents can be found here.

See also

• Bat chart
• Quad chart
• Powerpoint Engineering Measurement System
• Orion

External links

• NASA seeks to curb "PowerPoint engineering"
• Powerpoint engineering and the downfall of quality