Here’s a nice post by Viv McWaters that sums up my experience as a facilitator of group workshops where Powerpoint presentations are delivered.

I’ll add to Viv’s commentary and say …

• I agree that bullet points on slides should be banned 🙂

and …

In my recent experience, the best presentations happen when the technology fails and presenters have to go back to their ‘story’ and forget the script that emerges from text-dense slides. They often gravitate to the nearest whiteboard and start to draw pictures to help explain their key points. Why don’t their slides contain the same pictures?

Then the slideshow works well as a set of ‘participant notes’ for them to take away and refer back to.

As Garr Reynolds at Presnetation Zen would say … In Sum:

There are 3 parts to a presentation …

1. The Story (or narrative) that the presenter tells

2. The Slideshow containing Pictures (or simple graphs/charts) and ‘few words’ that help to shine a light on the key message (on it’s own the slideshow should be of little use to participants)

3. The participant handout that is given out at the end containing a summary of the narrative, resources and key detail given

And here is a very long (and educational) slideshow designed by Garr to be clicked-through fast. It summarises 3 chapters of a great book by Dr John Medina about how the brain works. His findings have implications for our slideshow design and delivery.

Cheers

Geoff