If you work in corporate America you have been conditioned to have very low expectations from powerpoint presentations. It doesn't have to be that way.
Here is a list of insights from Slide:ology, an interesting book about “the art and science of creating great presentations” :
- Presentation software is the first application broadly adopted by professionals that requires people to think visually.
- It’s laziness on the presenter’s part to put everything on one slide.
- To succeed as a presenter you must think as a designer. Designers focus on experience and every decision they make is intentional. It’s a good rule to try to remove everything on a slide that doesn’t bring emphasis to your point.
- Removing means empty space. But empty space is not nothing. It’s a powerful something and we have to learn to see it that way. Equally, a pause during a presentation is a tool. It creates drama and reinforces the story.
- “The three second rule”: the audience should be able to quickly ascertain the meaning of a slide before turning their attention back to the presenter. If a slide contains more than 75 words it’s a document. The audience reads ahead and has to wait for you to catch up (eventually they stop paying attention to you and you also look slow)
- Data slides are not about data. They are about the meaning of the data.
- People’s retention of data increases when they can “see” the numbers. (Example: 100 drops of water represent 100% of water on earth; animation of one water drop dissolving reveals that only 1% is fresh water)
Slide:ology is available from O'Reilly Media.
*one of the opening lines of the book (paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln)
