One of the services we provide for our clients is that we take their PowerPoint presentation and turn it into something that is more visually pleasing and much easier to sit through. Often this is what we start with from our clients: pages upon pages of bullet points. We take those bullet points and turn them into images.
One of the rules in the book Brain Rules is: vision trumps all other senses. Images communicate so much more effectively on screen than text. You shouldn’t let your message get derailed by slides that are overly complicated and busy. Nothing in your slide should be superfluous and you should use plenty of white space. The slides aren’t supposed to be the main attraction of your talk; they are supposed to supplement what you say. The best slides have no words at all.
Our average power point slide is 40 words. Use pictures and don’t kill your audience with bullet points. This increases engagement and people’s interest. We start with 1000s of words on a PowerPoint slide and turn it into an image.
If it’s hard for you to give up bullet points, provide a detailed handout for your audience to be passed out after your talk. That way you won’t have to feel compelled to fill your PowerPoint slides with lots of text.
