Meryl's Notes Blog

Beyond Bullet Points is an excellent book that shows you how to create effective presentations with PowerPoint. The software isn’t the reason presentations have turned dull and unfocused — but the abuse of using the templates. PowerPoint templates come with generic phrases and some users don’t bother changing the headers.

Kids today learn how to use PowerPoint in school to use for presentations. If they’re anything like my daughter, they love to go wild with lots of colors and animation. Since they rarely give the kind of presentation found in the templates, maybe there’s hope kids will move away from the generic style.

Some colleges like University of Chicago require submitting a few slides of PowerPoint as part of their admissions process — to give the students a chance to show their creative side.

The book recommends focusing on telling a story along with using a theme/motif. If you’re going to squeeze text to take up all the space in every slide — then you might as well as e-mail the presentation. No one wants to hear a presenter read the slides. The author’s site, Sociable Media, provides templates for creating presentations. But the book explains how to go about using the templates.

What memorable presentations have you seen or given? What made them successful?