What? PowerPoint without bullets?

How many times have you sat through a presentation in which the presenter showed a PowerPoint slide filled with tons of text and several levels of bullet points?

Uh huh. Me, too. Zzzz.

Shellie Tucker, a writer for the Training and Demos team, has written numerous online courses and some videos about PowerPoint. In her new article, Office Hours: PowerPoint without bullets, Shellie explores a new way to create PowerPoint presentations. Here's an excerpt:

Even at Microsoft, where PowerPoint is developed, people who use it tend more toward the text dump-a-thon approach than to tapping the program's high visual and entertainment potential. I see why it happens. We're under pressure to deliver a certain amount of information in the slide show, and the most direct method seems to be to fill up the bullet points with it. End of story.

The sad thing is, the result is torture for an audience to sit through. By contrast, we think wistfully of those few presentations in our lives that have been fun to watch, from start to finish — with presenters who really wanted to engage us, and who used the slides to play video or display clever images or conceptual graphics that brought home what they were saying.

Read the rest of Shellie's great article, Office Hours: PowerPoint without bullets.

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• Anonymous
  July 01, 2008
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