Steve Jobs rarely uses complete sentences in his Keynote presentation slides. Credit: Wired
Seth Godin offers some great tips on preparing PowerPoint presentations that will leave an impact on your audience. Favorite picks:
1. Here’s the deal: You should have to put $5 into the coffee fund for every single word on the wordiest slide in your deck. 400 words costs $2000. If that were true, would you use fewer words? A lot fewer? If you have bullets, please, please, please only use one word in each bullet. Two if you have to. Three never.
2. If people are live-blogging, twittering or writing down what you’re saying, I wonder if your presentation is everything it could be. After all, you could have saved everyone the trouble and just blogged it/note-taken it for them, right? (hint: bullets demand note-taking. The minute you put bullets on the screen, you are announcing, "write this down, but don’t really pay attention now.")
More PowerPoint related stories:
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/software/organize/useful-powerpoint-tips-seth-godin/4847/
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
hmm, point 2 seems a little odd. All this time we have been told to create bullet points in ppts..They are supposed to be better for understanding immediately by providing a separation..
Written by Shantanu Goel on 10.08.08
I admire the 3×3 rule.
Each slide should have
1) no more than three lines
2) no more than three words on each line
It might be difficult to stick to 3×3 strickly but anything close would be great.
Written by benjamin on 10.08.08
Moving from reader to reading on the site! Guess I owe a few comments! I’ve somehow been more fond of visual imagery with very little text. Any takes on that?
Written by Ankur on 10.09.08
Nice article Amit. To the point and quite helpful. Guy had some similar thoughts about Powerpoint presentations here link (though they are more apt for VC presentations)
Written by Snehal Shinde on 10.11.08
Something exceptional, which I learnt some days back, while preparing ppt for customer meeting.
ppt should be made to refer your point, while actually speaking to the client.The client should actually understand your words, rather than looking at ppt.
So, in a way, I agree to 3×3 rule above. Makes sense, anything near this, will be helpful in life going forward.
Thanks, Amit, for this excellent blog.
Written by Kinshuk on 10.11.08