By low-res, Tufte is referring to the concept of stacking information in time, rather than placing it adjacent in space. (this is all his insight, not mine) It

By low-res, Tufte is referring to the concept of stacking information in time, rather than placing it adjacent in space. (this is all his insight, not mine) It's "low res" in the same way a phone voice-mail menu is low-res "press 1 for x, press 2 for y, press 3 for z, etc". You get bits of information sequentially, stacked in time. The onus is on you, the receiver, to piece the information together into some sort of mental matrix so you can make your decision. A high-res counter-example would be seeing all options together, like you would in a table of contents. One way PPT is low-res is that there is not enough room on a slide to type full sentences. It wants you to dilute your thoughts into a bullet list or some similar fragmented format. Often a presentation involves a series of slides, and ideally you'd want the audience to make comparisons between slides e.g. Before XXX, After XXX, & Therefore XXX is good. The sequentiality of slides is another example of it being low-res. This increases the cognitive effort needed to engage with your content, making it difficult for anyone to actually think critically about what you are saying. In other words, it's a great sales tool! The paper handout is an excellent idea. You can fit the information of about 250 ppt slides onto a standard 11x17 sheet of paper. PPT can be useful in other cases (I've used it for drawing seating charts), but it tends to be pretty terrible for presenting any sort of analytical content. I've seen a many PPT presentations from accomplished, smart people, and I can't recall a single one that wouldn't have been more effective as a paper handout.