PowerPoint whys and hows

Public speaking coach (and Facebook friend) Nick Morgan recently published 10 Rules for Creating Successful Power Point Presentations. He gives a comprehensive and practical guide based on one major principle: slides are for illustrating. Not for explaining. Not for describing. Not for selling. Explaining, describing, and selling are the speaker's job. The slides are there to make a visual impression that reinforces the audience's reaction to what the speaker is saying.

Things that belong on slides:

• Photographs
• Charts and graphs
• Single numbers

Things that do not belong on slides:

• More than five words at once
• Agendas describing the presentation

This is all great advice for PowerPoint presentations that are being used to accompany a speaker. But I've worked in many organizations where PowerPoint is also used to create presentations and proposals that are intended to be read on their own, either after a live presentation or in lieu of one. For the audience's sake, though, we need to respect the difference between PPTs created for different purposes... which means resisting the urge to give a live presentation using slides created for private reading.

So what about those presentations that are meant to be consumed without a speaker? Ideally, those should be illustrative too. Consider the effective, cheeky and pleasing "What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later" by Marta Kagan. Agree or disagree with its conclusions, this piece demonstrates that speakerless slides don't have to mean blocks of text, lists, and bullet points:

What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later

View more documents from Marta Kagan.