I attended one of his day long seminars recently, and I was displeased with the lack of breadth and depth. Sure, he rails against PowerPoints like no other, we get that. My biggest issue is that everything he presented was from someone else-- he's literally just aggregating other people's work and postulating on them with fuzzy emotional thoughts-- and barely anything applies to dynamic, user driven displays such as you would find on a web dashboard.

How to save yourself $300 hundred dollars AKA My half page of notes from the seminar:

0) Get the books on eBay or Amazon if you _really_ want them.

1) Don't use PowerPoint. Try to convince your viewers to browse a web page as the presentation, after you've convinced your IT staff to set up a web server for your presentation.

2) Look at ESPN.com, Weather.gov and Google News and Google Maps if you want to see what he thinks are the pinnacle of data presentations on the web. This will save you a few hours.

3) "Use verbs not Nouns"
Show comparisons and mechanisms.

4) "Do whatever it takes to express the information"

5) "Show interaction between objects"

6) "Don't use boxes or drop shadows". Avoid "Chart Junk"

7) "Use small multiples" (he peddled his spark lines and ESPN's groups of stats)

8) Make paper based, text presentations and supply that to people as the arrive at the meeting. This way they can read that before jumping in with questions. The paper allows them to skip ahead and read what they want to know about so they don't interrupt you.

9) Calm the f2ck down when you go to meetings. He spent about an hour giving a lame rendition of How to Win Friends and Influence People. In one sentence: Be nice, be patient, be persuasive.

10) Ask yourself:

==1) "What's the problem?"

==2) "Why does it matter?"

==3) "What are you going to do about it?"

Other issues I had with his seminar:

1) I disliked the way he was surrounded by his thug ushers, who seemed to comb the aisles looking for someone or some thing. It made me feel like I was at a cult meeting or that they were worried about someone recording the seminar.

2) I disliked his peddling of his mother's book and his sculptures.

3) His dour emotional expressions about not wanting to teach government how to visualize things (This meeting was in Arlington VA, so I'm sure there were lots of military folks/contractors) in wake of the leaks. That's fine but now you look like a sellout, 'teaching' them anyway.

4) The multiple videos presentations about visualizing musical data. That's cute, but the guy is off his rocker if he thinks people are going to use that in place of a traditional presentation.

5) The repeated videos. I think we watched the same video three times of a Swiss topological map with an ethnic female voice narrating. By the second time I was already thinking to myself 'I wish he would stop wasting my time with that'.

6) I understand there is a cult of personality around him, and I generally thought highly of his name until I went to the seminar. A coworker who went a few months before me told me it wasn't worth the time, but it was the cult of personality that caused me to go. He ended up pretty much being a douche in person. Not one visualization we saw was created by him, he is literally curating other's great works, and for that, you can pick up used books on your own or visit a library.

7) All in all it felt way too touchy-feely and not very concrete. He only _briefly_ made mention of R and D3, saying they were high end, advanced visualization tools, that we as an audience shouldn't be using, because they are too complex. WTF.

8) Things that are NOT covered:
a) Moving data, aside from his video visualization of music that he found somewhere.
b) Visualizaing dynamic graphs or Sankeys.
c) Interactive displays, such as on a website for users to use. The closest he came was to extol the virtues of ESPN. He literally recommended to bring up your presentations to the level of ESPN.com, and you'd meet with success.

TLDR; To each his own, but I wish I had my day back.