I was scanning through my blog reader last night, and came across a great post about building better PowerPoint presentations. As someone who gets—forcibly—exposed to far too many (bad) PowerPoint presentations, I feel that it is incumbent upon me to pass along worthy PPT tips when I find them.
In a recent entry on his blog, Seth Godin talks about the atomic method of creating a PowerPoint presentations. If we assume that an average person talks at a speed of 10-12 sentences per minute, and that an average talk lasts about 5 minutes, Seth figures that you will need a minimum of 50 slides (1 per sentence) for each presentation. Some of these slides will have words and some will have images, but they will all contain a single idea. These are your atoms, the smallest, most basic points in your conversation. Seth tells us to then link the slides together, and start practicing the presentation. Where things don’t fit, drop them out. When slides seem to fit together, combine them.
Take your most important ideas and points, and work with them. Take all of the fluff that doesn’t add value to the presentation and dump it.
In other words, take your atoms, and start building molecules...
...and always avoid those dreaded bulleted lists.
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