One of the worst features about Microsoft’s PowerPoint software is that it has far too many bells and whistles. It offers far too many “things” for the presenter. You can have those awful  bullet points fly in from the top, fly in from the bottom, fade in and fade out, fly in from the left or fly in from the right. You have an endless supply of cheesy clip arts to choose from. You can have your huge corporate logo and your name on every slide. I have seen slides where these junk takes up a third of the real estate.

Try to keep your presentation slides simple. One idea and one picture. The rest are just distractions.

I recently purchased a 12-cup coffee maker from a big box store. It costs $10! And it has only ONE button. That’s the on/off switch. The coffee tastes the same as that from a programmable high tech coffee making machine that costs 10 times as much.  

Simplicity is the key.

Kodak has just announced that it will retire its Kodachrome color slide film after 74 years. It was done in by the digital media AND PowerPoint. We will miss those beautiful color slides of our family.

But we will not miss those 14 bullet points jammed into one single Kodachrome slide.

In the bad old days when we had to pay some company $3 or $4 for every single slide we need for our presentation, we naturally put as much information as possible on a single slide. It made economic sense then.

But now – thanks to PowerPoint – we can have as many slides as we want and they are all FREE!!! So there is NO need to jam 14 bullet points in a single slide and put the audience in a deep coma.

Remember – one point per slide and lots of pictures.

Have you ever been to a conference where different speakers give presentations on a single theme? The presentations all relate to the same theme and yet they appear to be totally disjointed and unrelated. Each speaker gives his presentation as if he is the ONLY one talking about the theme at the conference. 

There is no connectivity at all among the various speakers even though they are supposed to be talking about the same general topic.

When I started out in my environmental seminar business, I used to sign up as a guest speaker with a company that conducted 2-day seminars on environmental regulations. This company would invite 6 or 7 speakers (consultants and attorneys) to its seminar and have them speak on areas of their expertise. One person would speak for an hour on the Clean Water Act, another on the Clean Air Act and another one on hazardous waste management, etc.  

Those invited speakers would talk as if the other speakers never existed even though all of these environmental laws are related. They would show up 15 minutes before their own presentation and leave right after it. They had no idea what came before and after them. The end result was a series of totally disjointed and unconnected presentations that was confusing to the audience.

If you want your presentation to stand out or be momorable to the audience, you need to come in early and sit through the presentations of previous speakers so that you can make reference to their talk when it is time to do yours.

You will be amazed how well the audience will receive you.

Many people use a lot of technical jargon and acronyms in their presentations because it gives them a sense of superiority over the common folks. This is particularly true with scientists and engineers. They like to speak “a language of their own”. That’s fine if everyone in the audience has the same training and understanding of the topic being presentation. But that is never the case.

You should use acronyms sparingly and only if the terms they represent are going to appear throughout the entire presentation. But many presenters use acronyms only once in their presentation. They end up offering an alphabet soup to the audience that is hard to digest with the inevitable result.

I was at an environmental conference in Phoenix that was hosted by the semiconductor manufacturing industries. Lots of talk about greenhouse gas and environmental sustainability. Many scientists and engineers gave talks and all of them were in PowerPoint format. with one exception, all of the PowerPoint presentations had too small fonts, too many bullet points and too many abbreviations.

The attached slide on the right has 11 abbreviations (ASTM, ANSI, SEMI, S23, GRI, SDO and so on), 6 bullet points, 13 sub bullet points and 2 sub-sub bullet points. All cramped into one SINGLE slide! The presenter is an attorney.

The font size in another presentation was so small that the bullet points were not readable from the back of a relatively small room. 

For a copy of my presentation (without any bullet points) on environmental sustainability, click here.

The basic rules:

1. Do not use bullet points

2. Use one point per slide with an appropriate image

3. Use as many slides as you have points

4. The first 5 slides are the most important ones.

Click here for a brief slide show that demonstrates this concept.

When presenting scientific or technical data, many people make the big mistake of treating the presentation as the oral form of a scientific or technical journal. That’s why they jam every possible number and footnote onto a single slide thereby making it totally unreadable to the audience.

The way to do it properly is to pick out the essential points of the topic and focus on them one point and one slide at a time. You can include all your footnotes and references in a handout AFTER the presentation. Or you can tell the audience where they can download the information from a website.

Never throw a bunch of numbers up on a slide. Never show a big matrix of rows and columns of numbers in a presentation. If you intend to demonstrate a trend, show a simple graph or bar chart. and the key word is “simple”.  You need to do the number crunching for the audience. In other words, do not expect the audience to sit there and figure out a trend from your raw data. They won’t do that. And if they do, they will definitely not be paying attention to you. 

Your slide should not be any more complicated than the slide to the left. Any more words or numbers on that slide would make it too busy to read. 

Simplicity is the key to any PowerPoint presentation.

In this post, we look at a couple of incredibly horrible slides prepared by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. These two slides come from a stack of some 193 slides in a presentation that analyzes a proposed Senate Bill on climate change. This topic in and of itself is an exceedingly complicated scientific subject to discuss. Just imagine the poor audience who sat through those 193 slides.

I defy anyone to read any of these slides.

Apparently people no longer prepare written reports. Everything - no matter how complicated – is presented in PowerPoint slides loaded with bullet points. 

There is an interesting story that Lou Gerstner told in his book “Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance”. Lou is the former CEO of IBM who turned the behemoth around. Apparently, he was able to make the big elephant dance.

At an important meeting, as one of his executives was making a formal presentation on an overhead projector. Lou simply stepped to the table and, as politely as he could in front of the presentation team, switched off the projector. After a long moment of awkward silence, Lou simply said to the staffer, “Let’s just talk about your business.” Lou Gerstner mentioned this episode because it had an unintended, but terribly powerful ripple effect throughout IBM.

Formal presentation is just one of the many ways for you to convey your message to your audience.

The pervasive PowerPoint slides have not just invaded the corporate world where complicated business strategies have been reduced to clusters of bullet points. In his best seller book “Fiasco” on the Iraqi war, Tom Ricks describes how General McKiernan was unable to get General Tommy Franks “to issue clear orders that stated explicitly what he wanted done, how he wanted to do it, and why. Rather, Franks passed along PowerPoint briefing slides taht he had show to (Defense Secretary) Rumsfeld.”

Not all in the military were big fans of PowerPoint. Colonel H. R. McMaster “all but banning the use of PowerPoint briefings by his officers. The Army loves these bulleted briefings, but McMaster had come to believe that the ubiquitous software inhibits clarity in thinking, expression, and planning.”

McMaster was finally promoted to brigadier general in 2008 by none other than General Petraeus.

I came across this video some time ago. It is inspiring and very well made. A great presentation without a single bullet point! Enjoy.