Others say...

"Better Presentations"
I've been doing presentations since the BP (before Powerpoint) era and I have a structure that I've used since the beginning. This book caused me to rethink my approach, and, after using it on several recent presentations, I have to say it is a change for the better. Highly recommended if quality communications is your goal.

"a very, very helpful book on creating effective presentations"
While I didn't adopt the 3 > 3 approach Atkinson suggests, I really took to heart his idea of replacing wordy, boring slides with those with only a title (a concept, expressed as a sentence) and high-impact relevant graphics. As a result, I created a six-hour workshop (on personal productivity) that contained a total of five bullets (out of 130 slides). I also created - from the same slide show - a prose booklet that participants take home. Very useful.

More at: What a difference a framework can make
http://ideamatt.blogspot.com/2007/04/what-difference-framework-can-make.html

"What I hoped against, and worse"
I borrowed this book expecting to disagree with much of what was said, but hoping it would be a productive disagreement: opening my eyes to some techniques and sharpening my judgment about when to use what.

The book provides an extended example that is so bad (by my judgment) that if I had been the presenter's boss, I would have told him "Screw up like this one more time and you're fired!" My reaction to the example presentation was either
(1) The presenter's primary motivation was to impress the audience with his brilliance by keeping an extended metaphor going, and he spent so much time on it that he forgot about content, or
(2) The presenter knew he didn't understand the problem and tried to hide it with flash.

Example: The slide entitled "The pharmaceuticals industry today is navigating a sea of change" has a graphic of a compass (or alternatively a steering wheel) as the body of the slide. What would have been useful would have been an enumeration (graphic or textual) of the (major) obstacles.

The excellent advice to not have your slides distract from your presentation is taken to an extreme and beyond. Bullets are very easy to misuse, but they do have important uses. For example:
(1) Use the "visual channel" to provide additional reinforcement to what you are emphasizing in your talk, and
(2) Remind the audience of the priorities and structure of the issue. This is a great tool when you have audience members who are inclined to go off on tangents or become obsessively focused on a minor detail.

I saw no value in the scheme of treating a presentation as a three-act play. I am not arguing against division into three phases - a basic pattern of presentations is (1) tell them what you are going to tell them, (2) tell them, and (3) tell them what you have told them. It was all the extra baggage of the template. I pulled one of my most highly refined presentations from the files and I could see that I might be able to force it into his detailed scheme. But I couldn't see how it would have helped me develop that or other similar presentations, and expect that it would have pushed me down counterproductive paths.

The subtitle of the book is "create presentations that inform, motivate and inspire." I do not do inspirational presentations, but I do see how these techniques could be helpful for such presentations. Similarly for motivational presentations that are primarily inspirational, rather than fact-based. I have seen a number of inspirational PowerPoint presentations and the graphics he uses here are so bland that they don't qualify as banal (Emotive does *not* require children, puppies, flags and belching factories).

It occurred to me that an interesting exercise would be to step through the DVD of Al Gore's PowerPoint presentation "An inconvenient truth" to see how well it fits the author's three-act structure for such presentations (Its Academy Award suggests that it should fit the traditional dramatic structure better than an arbitrarily chosen PPT).

I had a nagging feeling that the author strongly favors speeches and doesn't like PowerPoint, but has been told that he has to use it, so he has a system to minimize the role of PowerPoint in his presentations. I don't remember the author mentioning the use of a PowerPoint component to *augment* or complement what you are saying.

The writing in the book ranged from poor to adequate. There were extended sections where my reaction was that he was just droning on. Although his system for creating presentation is based upon classical rhetoric, there was little of those techniques visible in the book-as-presentation.


"Great for some, but NOT ALL SLIDES!"
I'm a MS Certified Instructor, MOUS expert on MS Office 95, 97, 2000, 2003, and have been a PowerPoint trainer for 9 years.

The biggest issue learners have with using PowerPoint as a presentation tool is overcoming the compulsive need to design the slides to read as a speech. Once they are educated to understand that the slide show is a component of the overall presentation, and should be treated as an enhancement to the speaker's verbal message, they begin to design slides that summarize and convey impact to the major speaking points delivered to the audience.

Bullets serve a legimate purpose - they aid the audience in organizing the information being conveyed into logical, heirarchical format. This assists with both learning and information retention. It is true that improper use of bullet points(too much text per bullet, flat format [too many or exclusivly top level bullets], overuse of the bullet slide layout)creates a low-impact, boring presentation. However, it is equally true that the total eradication of bullet points can have the same result! Here's why:

The audience perceives the standard slide design within 7-10 slides. They then begin to anticipate the design of the next slide before it is displayed. Repetative slide design, whether it is bullets or graphics, causes this to happen faster. Once the audience can anticipate slide design, their attention moves from the actual content of the presentation to the visuals on the screen, and the presenter has to fight to convey the message.

The best way to design a visual presentation is to VARY THE SLIDE DESIGN. This will keep the audience interested in the MESSAGE itself, not in the visuals on display.

Remember that the overall intent of any presentation is to convey a message - not to dazzle the audience with visual sparkle. The presentation is an ENHANCEMENT so that the audience will retain information, and is should not DETRACT from the message.

The best tool I've ever seen for slide design is available in software form. Google "Design Sense for Presentations". This is not another "how to" PowerPoint tutorial - it is a Visual Design instructional course that talks about varying design layout according to a THEME - the theme is used for consistency, but the slide content is varied for visual impact and to maintain audience interest.

It does NOT ban bullet points, but shows how to use them tastefully, with variety and intrigue, so as to capture the interest of the audience.

Good Luck to all those who want to improve!

"Beyond Bullet Points"
I had bought this book for a college course and that is the only reason. If not I would not have purchased it. It's okay if you have to do power point in this format. As a scientist, we would not have done it this. It is not always feasible to do so many slides for one presentation. I'm not sure if my audience want to see a photo on every slide. They are more interested in results and not pictures that are not pertinent.