One of the things that Mr. Tufte is well known for is his recognition of and analysis of Charles Joseph Minard's graphical presentation of Napoleon's march on Moscow in the War of 1812. The graphic was produced way back in 1869 and is quite a novel depiction of the tremendous loss of life in Napoleon's disastrous campaign in Russia. A great anti-war document.
On more recent presentations, Tufte came down pretty hard on the use of Microsoft Power Point which he sees as one of the evils of modern software. He quite rightly feels that Power Point makes it too easy to generate visually appealing presentations that are so often poorly reasoned and devoid of meaningful content. He has been quite a critic of NASA's reliance on Power Point presentations and has linked the reliance of NASA Engineers on poorly crafted Power Point presentations to the Columbia disaster.
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