Hallelujah! Cliff Atkinson’s extraordinary book, Beyond Bullet Points, instantly converted me from a PowerPoint detractor to a PowerPoint enthusiast.

Why?

Because the BBP method of creating PowerPoint presentations turned my conventional thinking about PowerPoint on its head. And, as the cartoon above illustrates, conventional PowerPoint thinking is woefully inadequate.

We’ve all experienced the boredom of a PowerPoint presentation consisting of slide after slide of boring bullet points on a dull and unchanging background. We’ve all sat in agony as the presenter reads each bullet point verbatim as our thoughts turn to the work piling up on our desk. We’ve all twisted in our chairs wondering how we got sucked into this meeting and what on earth we will learn from it.

No more!

Beyond Bullet Points is a complete system for creating PowerPoint presentations that engage, instruct, and even excite the audience. Atkinson’s system is based on sound and widely accepted principles of learning and communication, which is why every time I read one of his recommendations, my reaction was the same -

DUH! Why didn’t I think of that?

Maybe I’m the only one in the world who hasn’t heard of BBP, but here are a few things I picked up which every PowerPoint creator ought to know.

First step - map out your whole presentation on a template. Sensible and obvious, yet I never thought of doing it. Did you? BBP uses a template built on classic storytelling techniques. Laying out the whole presentation in advance guarantees you’ll include the necessary, exclude the unnecessary, and sequence slides in the most compelling order.

Vary your template. Not every slide has to look the same. In fact, changing up slide colors and layouts keeps the audience alert and visually cues them to take notice of important points.

Use full, meaningful sentences in your headlines. It is easier for the audience to retain information delivered in complete sentences than in sentence fragments, especially if the fragments are meaningless or written to be merely clever. Just like print ads or newspaper stories, PowerPoint headlines carry the load in delivering a message. In my case, I’d spend most of time working out the content of the slide body and throwing in a headline as an afterthought, thinking it to be a mere accessory. Wrong!

Don’t fill the slide with words. (This one I sort of figured out on my own.) When you put lots of words in your slides, they compete with your spoken words for the attention of the audience. Thus, the audience becomes confused and remembers little. But if you fill your slides with images which visually reinforce and compliment your spoken message, you make it easy for the audience to focus and remember.

Like I said, it might be this is old news to you, but if not, I highly recommend this book. PowerPoint presentations aren’t going away - in fact, PowerPoint 2007 is considerably more robust and versatile than previous versions. Every organization should know the PowerPoint fundamentals to get the best mileage out of meeting time.

Thanks to Brian Clark and Tony Clark for cluing me into Beyond Bullet Points through their Teaching Sells curriculum!