20-20 vision: PowerPoint by numbers [BT broadband office]

20-20 vision: PowerPoint by numbers

Posted 5 September 2007 at 8:32AM by Simon Dickson in IT systems and support

PowerPoint may not have killed off the slideshow after all. A pair of London-trained architects, now based in Tokyo, have come up with a new approach, which has been a big hit in the creative industries, and is starting to be taken up by the business world.

By the rules of Pecha Kucha, a Japanese term translated as 'chit chat', you get 20 slides, and just 20 seconds to talk about each of them. A grand total of six minutes, forty seconds to make your point. Roughly sixty words per slide, or fifty if you're planning on breathing in. And if you're feeling really sadistic, you can always set PowerPoint to move to the next slide automatically. Just to keep the presenters on their toes, you know.

There are now Pecha Kucha Nights in cities worldwide, where maybe a dozen designers gather to show off their latest creations - and it can be an exhilarating experience. Even if the current presentation doesn't inspire you, at least you know the next one is a maximum of 400 seconds away. But why should the arty crowd have all the fun? We've all been to business meetings and company 'away days' with interminable presentations by senior managers. It might be worth a try..? In PowerPoint, if you look among the 'transitions' options, you should see an option for 'Advance slide'... 'Automatically after'. Tick the box, set it to '00:20', and 'apply to all slides'. For added rigour, you can always disable the ability to proceed to the next slide by clicking.

Or, for another presentations-by-numbers approach - see this video by venture capitalist and former Mac evangelist, Guy Kawasaki. He advocates a ten-twenty-thirty rule: ten slides, twenty minutes - and a minimum of thirty-point font. As he rightly points out, if you need to put so much text on your slide that you need to use 12pt fonts, you're clearly a bozo.

Tags: guy kawasaki, pecha kucha, powerpoint, presentations, slideshows

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Comments

1. At September 7, 2007 4:30 PM, Anne Grainger wrote:

Brilliant idea 'pecha kucha' if you can't say it in 20 don't say it at all. i look forward to bright open forums where 95% of the audience are not losing the will to live.....

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