How to keep your audience’s attention

Chris Atherton (and more about her here) has a great blog post on how to give a presentation that keeps your audience’s attention. It’s from the angle of student presentations (she’s a college lecturer), but the points apply to any presenter.

Dr. Atherton’s research

Dr. Atherton also did research comparing slides with significant bulleted [...]

New video lesson on YouTube!

Are you still creating PowerPoint slides with lots of bullets and text? This 4-min. video will revolutionize how you create presentations. You’ll see a makeover, step-by-step, that gets rid of a distracting background and turns a boring, bulleted slide into a clear, image-rich presentation.

Ellen Finkelstein can train you or the presenters in [...]

Create a slide list

A printed list of slides is very helpful when you present. You can use the list to move quickly to a specific slide (in Slide Show view, just type the number of the slide and press Enter). To create a slide list, follow these steps:

In the left pane, which usually shows slide [...]

How many bullets should I put on a slide?

People often ask, “How many bullets should I put on a slide?”

"How many bullets should I put on a slide?"

First I’ll tell you what others are saying. Then I’ll give you my answer.

“6 lines or less per slide, 6-8 words per line”

“6 words per line, 6 lines [...]

Undim bulleted text

Bulleted text elicits a lot of animated, opinionated discussion. I’ve covered the pros and cons of bulleted text and provided some tips for working with, or without, them:

* Quickly get rid of bullets * Cliff Atkinson’s Beyond Bullet Points

Sometimes, you can’t think of a way to avoid bullets. So, how do you [...]

Is PowerPoint evil?

If you’re interested in PowerPoint and its effectiveness for communication, you have probably read some of the discussion that followed Edward Tufte’s 2003 disparaging essay, “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint.”

I thought that this was an old story, but then I read Don Norman’s recent essay, “In Defense of PowerPoint.” I decided that [...]

Quickly get rid of bullets

Why would you want to get rid of bullets in your presentations? In short, they can turn a good presentation into a boring one.

But how do you get rid of bullets? Recently, a woman called me to ask if I had any courses explaining how to create presentations without bullets. She was [...]