Meryl's Notes Blog

It’s not PowerPoint’s fault that presentations have become boring and useless. After all, it just supplies the tools and it’s what we do with it that matters. Found this Hugh MacLeod PowerPuke cartoon that captures my thought perfectly.

Sure, PowerPoint comes with templates. Again, people don’t customize the presentation for their audience’s needs. They just fill in the headings and bullets without giving much thought. This compelled me to start this list of great examples.

Many of the examples are based on slides than on a person giving the presentation. After all, I rely heavily on slides. When they tell me something without making me read a book and give me an idea of what the speaker is saying (keeping me on cue if I am able to understand the speaker), then it’s moost likely a great presentation.

Please email or post a comment if you know of others.

Presentations

1. Banish Boring Presentations
2. Beyond Monetization: Build Lasting Value Through Social Media
3. The Brand Gap based on the best-selling book.
4. The CommonCraft Show: Known for its Social Networking in Plain English — high energy and fast-paced presentations. I wanna be like them!
5. Debunking Third World Myths with Hans Rosling
6. Dick Hardt on Identity 2.0 and Who’s the Dick on My Site?
7. Flickr: All about pictrs
8. Footnotes: How feet can be entertaining.
9. Garr Reynolds of PresentationZen on presentations @GoogleTalks.
10. Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation
11. Gore speech on global warming
12. Guy Kawasaki Truemors presentation
13. History of the Button: Pick any button…
14. How to Make Big Things Happen with Small Teams by Jason Fried of 37Signals. I’ve heard (seen) him speak and he kept my attention — I could actually follow along and cared about what he had to say.
15. I Am the Media: On word of mouth
16. Inbox Zero by Merlin Mann
17. An Introduction to Visual Thinking
18. Meet Henry, Mr. MBA who doesn’t know spit about presentations. Now Meet Everyone.
19. Logic + Emotion and One Year Later
20. Panipuri: Presentation on a food item.
21. Pecha Kucha: Get to the PowerPoint in 20 slides then sit the hell down
22. PowerPoint 2007 Design Fashion Trends
23. Shift Happens: Everyone I knew was talking about it including a middle school principal, a university professor, family, and business colleagues. It’s rare when a topic crosses all parts of my life (business, personal, and educational). It caught so many people’s attention that information visualizing firm Xplane helped tweak it. The story behind the presentation and its wikispaces page.
24. Social Media: Good except for the blinding red slides.
25. Sustainable Food Lab: An organization bringing sustainability to food systems.
26. Steve Jobs’ iPod Introduction: I read about the presentation in The Perfect Thing, which had me in awe. Remember I don’t hear presentations very well, so reading about it had an impact — thus, the real thing had to be as great as it sounded. Of course, the iPhone and Macintosh (1984) introductions. Slides from the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference.
27. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design): Contains many great presentations — not many examples of slides. TED blog.
28. Tell Me A Story illustrates how to go Beyond Bullet Points (see Resources)
29. Thirst: We all need to do our part to help with the water crisis or prepared to be thirsty… and when we go without water for a week…
30. Translation as Vocation: Exactly that.
31. Two states of matter they didn’t teach you about in school [PPT file]: My third grader came home from school and asked me how many states of matters there were. I answered three: Solid, liquid, gas. He told me there were five. We researched this on the Internet and this PowerPoint presentation was the first thing we found. That’s all it took for us to understand it.
32. Unlocking Cool: What a trend hunter does.
33. Usability Anonymous: 12 Step Program for Better User Experiences
34. Visual and Creative Thinking: What We Learned from Peter Pan and Willy Wonka
35. What Is Design?
36. WOMM: Why word of mouth marketing works.
37. Zimbabwe in Crisis: Breaks my heart.

Resources

1. 43 Folders Best Presentation Tips
2. Absolute PowerPoint: Can a Software Edit Our Thoughts? [pdf file] By Ian Parker — From The New Yorker
3. Alltop Public Speaking blogs
4. American Rhetoric: Top 100 Speeches
5. Animotoritize: Help Banish Boring Business Presentations
6. Bad, bad, bad presentation. Do the opposite!
7. The Best Kept Secret of Great Presentations includes examples of great presentations
8. Beyond Bullet Points teaches how to tell a story with PowerPoint without resorting to useless templates. Think of it as presentation turned into visuals. Fabulous book and resource.
9. Briefcase Books: What Makes a Great Presentation? [pdf file]
10. Death by PowerPoint (YouTube version) and SlideShare version
11. Doc Searls’ It’s the Story, Stupid
12. Don Norman’ In Defense of PowerPoint
13. Ellen Finkelstein’s PowerPoint section
14. Guy Kawasaki on 10-20-30 presentation rule (video) and blog entry
15. “How to” Visual Effects in PowerPoint
16. The London Speaker: Toastmasters of London with plenty of good info.
17. MasterViews: Tons of tips, articles, and resources on presentations
18. Mother Tongue Annoyances: Lose the ums!
19. Official PowerPoint Home Page: Templates, training, articles, downloads and more
20. PowerPoint Extreme Makeover: Too long, but good info.
21. The PowerPoint FAQ
22. PowerPoint for Educators: Tricks and samples
23. PowerPoint in education: Many resources and samples.
24. PowerPoint in education: More examples of using PowerPoint in the classroom.
25. PowerPointless: Waving Goodbye to Bad Presentations
26. Presentation Revolution: Great stuff on storytelling
27. Presenters Online: Epson-sponsored resource for multimedia knowledge
28. Presenters University: Resources, articles, and forum
29. Seth Godin’s Really Bad PowerPoint (and how to avoid it) [pdf file]
30. SlideBoom: Share live presentations online.
31. Slideshare: Share presentations online.
32. Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes: Download the complete text.

Blogs

1. Bert Decker
2. Brad Montgomery
3. Business Presentations
4. Communication Nation
5. Dave Paradi’s PowerPoint Blog
6. Great Public Speaking
7. Guy Kawasaki’s Pitching and Presenting posts
8. Indezine: Blog and free PowerPoint templates.
9. The Extreme Presentation Blog doesn’t like Guy’s 10-20-30 rule and makes a good point. About time someone argued against the rule. Seriously — how many people follow this rule? Many of the great presentations don’t.
10. Pistachio Consulting Blog
11. PowerPoint Blog by TLC Creative has a pre-show checklist for downloading so you can verify all systems go or fix anything that’s stalled.
12. PowerPoint without Bullet Points Blog
13. The Presentation Examples Blog
14. Presentation Helper
15. PresentationZen: Wonderful blog on everything presentation. Garr published a book on the topic.
16. Professionally Speaking
17. Public Speaking Blogs list
18. Six Minutes and its massive list of public speaking blogs
19. Speak Schmeak
20. Speak to Lead
21. Tony’s PowerPoint Weblog
22. The YouBlog: Ideas on presentations, persuasion, selling, and communications.

Fun and Humor

1. Claymation with PowerPoint
2. How Not to Use PowerPoint
3. Origins of PowerPoint plus a sequel and other shows
4. PowerPoint Ballad
5. PowerPoint Karaoke: Make a PPT file of multiple presentations slides and cue ‘em. Each singer ad libs a presentation.
6. Presentation Pitfalls: Don’t Let This Happen to You Can you find all of the errors?
7. Read at Work makes it possible to read fiction and poetry… after all, it’s in PowerPoint and it looks like a real desktop.
8. Tim Lee PowerPoint comedy

Updated: September 3, 2008