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PowerPoint, bullets and Bill

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Ed Bott tweeted about the post titled Bullets are dead. Long live PowerPoint this morning which has some great advice one storytelling and speaking being more important than PowerPoint 101. it’s a bit like having a racing car but not bothering to get any driving skills – PowerPoint is a great tool but it often mis-used and often blamed for poor underlying presentation skills. I’ve learnt through painful experience and some great coaching that your underlying communications skills are way more important than whether you use Keynote, Sliderocket, Zoho or OpenOffice.

Having said all of that, once you have those skills honed, it doesn’t mean your bullet riddled presentation is going to do anything more than kill your audience (well, their attention at least) so we can turn to Garr Reynolds as always for great advice here. His post yesterday on the evolution of Bill Gates presentations is a fine example on the journey we can all take to eradicate bullets from our lives. Seriously, Bill’s recent presentations at TED and his Impatient Optimists presentation with his wife Melinda were visually arresting and seem to have helped Bill evolve in to an improved orator.

The lost art of storytelling…long may it live!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 12, 2010
    Agreed, those slides really work, with arresting images that illustrate the presentation, without BEING the presentation. Steve Jobs is just great at it - I doubt he ever shows a slide with more than five words on it, although sometimes even he doesn't pitch things quite right. Sometimes there's a tendency to try and create slides that can double up as ready-made notes for people to take away, so you have to make the slides wordy enough to communicate all the things you wanted to say - Big Mistake. put the work in, do a DIFFERENT thing as a handout, and don't hand out the deck. The other big handicap in corporate-world is the pressure to keep to the company standard templates, with logos and banners all over them, it makes it hard to use big images.   My advice is it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, so risk it, and if the preso goes down well, then you won't hear any more about it!