Five steps to create amazing PowerPoint shows [BT broadband office]

Five steps to create amazing PowerPoint shows

Posted 3 May 2007 at 8:28AM by Simon Dickson in Email and communications

I wrote something a couple of weeks back, noting that an Australian academic had called for PowerPoint to be ditched. A few readers echoed his sentiments; others spoke up in PowerPoint's defence.

We seemed to reach a consensus that PowerPoint wasn't a bad product, but it tended to be used badly - and didn't help itself by starting you off with bad defaults. We had a particularly interesting contribution from designer Alan Robertson:

Originally when Powerpoint v3 was around it was aimed specifically at designers; then Microsoft worked out that if they changed direction from design houses to in-house wizard-driven Powerpoint that they would make more money. The result is bland, same looking presentations (to your competitor - not in house) and terrible layout of text and graphics.

So how do you make a 'good' PowerPoint presentation? Over to a man we've mentioned here before, marketing guru Seth Godin. He lists 'five rules you need to remember to create amazing PowerPoint presentations':

No more than six words on a slide. EVER.
No cheesy images. Use professional stock photo images.
No dissolves, spins or other transitions.
Sound effects can be used a few times per presentation, but never use the sound effects that are built in to the program.
Don't hand out print-outs of your slides. They don't work without you there.

I'm not sure I necessarily agree with him on all of these... but he's absolutely right on the final point: we should ban people handing out copies of slides, or emailing slides on afterwards. And if people ask you to do it, you should be prepared to refuse. Write a proper summary, and hand that out to people. If the main role of your slides is to act as written documents after the event, then they aren't slides!

Tags: bullet points, powerpoint, presentations, seth godin, slideshows

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Comments

1. At May 4, 2007 8:38 PM, David Vachell wrote:

The best exponent of the effective use of powerpoint I have come across is Cliff Atkinson. His book "Beyond Bullet Points" (see http://www.beyondbullets.com) radically changed the way I think about presentation slides. Also he gets a lot of good coverage on the Microsoft web site (see: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/workessentials/HA011872851033.aspx).

And no - I have nothing to do with Cliff or Microsoft!

2. At May 8, 2007 7:43 PM, Gerry Steinhauer wrote:

In response to the Seth Godin 5 rules I think there are only 2:

1 Use as many words as you need to get your message across but remember - the audience can read more quickly than you can speak so don't put everything you're going to say up there.
2 Use effects sparingly, for emphasis and as ice breakers where appropriate for "your audience" and "your topic" (the emphasis means that you should know and understand both before starting).

Do remember that your presentation is a method of imparting and making your audience retain information. It's not a showcase of your technical Powerpoint skills.

There is nothing worse than a presentation that has a boring message and is being delivered in a monotone unless it's a presentation that has sacrificed substance for flashy wizardry.

Your audience should leave discussing what you said not how you made that effect work.

3. At May 8, 2007 8:53 PM, J. Douglas Jefferys wrote:

The problem with any of these "edicts" is that they don't take into account the real presentation world in which most businesspeople are forced to operate. Like Tufte, who gathers large groups to his seminars on "Designiing Presentations" and then sends them home to tell their bosses they shouldn't use PowerPoint ever again, these 5 rules don't help when you actually DO need 9 words on your slide to make your point. Or when you want a show a process and the only way to not overwhelm the audience is by using builds and transitions to show one step at a time.

Seth is a genius at marketing -and he should leave advice on presentation design to people whose genius is in design.

4. At May 9, 2007 1:12 PM, Alan Lane wrote:

Severe criticism of "Power point" misses an absolute fundamental. Nearly all the users have had no training in the delivery of information to audiences. Without these skills any chosen medium will be badly used, fancy designs do not equal good delivery, they are, afterall, only an aid. "Death by viewfoil" has been replaced by "massacre by powerpoint".

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