October 20, 2008

Shellie Tucker

How does a no-bullets approach work for scientific presentations? And is it realistic to be all visual, all the time? Two PowerPoint experts weigh in.

Applies to
Microsoft Office PowerPoint

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The drumbeat is steady on the subject of bullet points. Everywhere you turn, it seems, the word is that your slide show should not be a data dump — slides crammed with bulleted text and details that are impossible to read. Rather, it should be simple, suggestive, visual. It should tell a story. Above all, it should engage.

Catching that wave, we did a column last March about using Cliff Atkinson's "beyond bullet points" approach to slides. The goal of that is to make your slides almost entirely visual, using photos and graphics, and telling your slide show's story by using text mainly in slide titles. Bullet points: never.

That idea thrilled a good majority of you, according to your comments about the column. The experience of "death by PowerPoint" due to boring slides is universal enough that a lot of you were crying for alternatives.

But for some of you, doubts about using the no-bullets approach — particularly for highly technical data — persisted. You pointed out that when it comes to accuracy in reporting results of scientific studies, for example, you can't avoid providing details. And typically, all those details would need to go on the slides, in the form of many bullet points, many charts, many numbers, and much fine print.

You also claimed that being so visual in presentations simply was not realistic for you, given time limits and your boss's expectations.

But does all that data really need to go on your slides? And, if no-bullets doesn't seem like an option, is there some middle ground?

Learn how to be selective

For help with these questions, I turned to two PowerPoint professionals, Geetesh Bajaj and Echo Swinford. Bajaj and Swinford design PowerPoint presentations and templates, and work as trainers and consultants. This year they collaborated on the book Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 Complete Makeover Kit (Que Publishing, 2008), in which they teach best practices in slide design for a range of presentation types. The two also perform a vital function for Microsoft in their role as Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) for PowerPoint.

A big focus of Echo Swinford's is to help people create medical presentations, so she deals daily with the challenge of data-packed slides.

"The biggest thing the scientific-data presenters need to remember," she says, "is that their handout does not have to match their slides exactly. They need to concentrate on highlighting the important information for the audience and not jam it all on their slides. Move the supporting information to the speaker notes and use the slide to highlight what's important."

There's a lot in that statement. Breaking down the essential points:

• Slide content can be different from handout content.
• Limit the slide to the key thing you want the audience to get.
• Use your role as speaker to fill in the details for the audience.

In case this feels like jumping into deep water before adjusting your breathing apparatus fully, see the examples that follow, all created by Swinford for this article.

The clarity of a diagram

In these slides, Swinford shows how myriad details that are plunked into a list can get translated into something both more simple and more visual, and how you can use a separate handout for the audience takeaway.

 Note   Each slide is marked Before, Present, and Handout in the lower right-hand corner to make clear which version we're looking at.

Take this slide:

It describes how a study was conducted and what sort of study it was. As a bulleted list, it's not too bad. (We've seen worse.)

Here's Swinford's revision:

Ah, a picture! In contrast to being given the bare-bones data in a list, here we get a diagram showing the study's main phases. Color coding helps us read it, to get the study sequence and distinguish the details. As speaker, you'd supplement this with the study's particulars. Here's what your speaker notes might look like:

The simplified, pictorial information on the slide gives the audience just enough to absorb as you tell the full story.

About speaker notes   These are the notes you type in the notes pane below the slide in Normal view in PowerPoint. You can also type your notes text while in Notes Page view (View tab, Presentation Views group). Typically you'd print these notes out for yourself to use while presenting (in Print Preview or the Print dialog box, under Print What, you select Notes Pages), so the bulleted list on the page here represents talking points.

It's all in the handouts

Don't panic. There's another crucial piece to the scenario for creating audience friendly slides: your handout. Create a version of the slide that is just for the printed takeaway. You can put more of the study details on this slide and report the data more conventionally. Example:

You'd include the supporting information in the handout that you already shared as talking points when you presented the slide. So, the handout would look like this:

The level of detail in the handout can be more like what you'd expect in a document, paper, or journal — for the person who is sitting alone, reading, after the presentation is over and without a speaker to set the context and provide the details. All the data you want to include, for scientific accuracy, you can.

About handouts   When you print, PowerPoint includes Handouts as an option as well as Notes Pages. However, the Handout pages don't include the large notes space beneath the slide that the Notes Pages do. So, you'd create your handout in the same way as your speaker notes, typing in the notes pane for the slide or using Notes Page view. Then you'd print using the Notes Pages option.

The problem of clutter

What about when the issue really isn't too many bullet points, but just too much data? Another point that Swinford makes is that scientific data is inherently visual, being so often delivered in the form of diagrams, charts, and tables. But, as she points out, "The problem is that people clutter up the slide with so much stuff, it loses the visual impact it might have had." Once again, the key is to select what's most important for the slide and for your audience — reserving the rest for the speaker notes and a handout version.

Swinford mocked up a slide example of data overload:

What's the main point of this slide? The clue is in the bullet-pointed text on the right, "Volume reduction of both chambers of heart..." This information ought to be the slide title, so we know what the meta-analysis is measuring. And what the heck are all those numbers actually meant to show? It's hard to make out the meaning of the data.

This is Swinford's revision for the slide that would be presented:

Here, the chart is the main item retained; the audience is given just one aspect of the data to focus on. The descriptive text got shortened and converted into the slide title.

The speaker notes help give a fuller picture:

Swinford emphasizes that, in refining a slide to its main point, "the goal isn't to dumb down your data." The goal is to make one clear point with your slide, augmenting that with what you say. You can "talk to the details, just don't fill your slides with them."

For the handout version of the slide, details like the years of the study and the Standardized Mean Difference data are kept. The title is more specific, too.

And of course you'd include all the information you gave as speaker in the handout version.

 Tip   Electronic handouts: While you might use PowerPoint speaker notes or a Word document for a printed handout, Geetesh Bajaj offers this alternative: "...If you want to go electronic, and prevent users from editing your handouts, just save them as PDFs." He notes that both Word 2007 and PowerPoint 2007 allow you to create PDFs through a free add-in that you can download from the Microsoft site. "PDFs also provide an advantage in that they can be e-mailed or put up on a web site where the audience can download them. Don't forget to put up the download-URL on the last slide of your presentation, in that case."

Changing your approach

You might be wondering, "How do I make my slides different from my handout when I'm used to my slides doubling as my handout?"

It's time to rethink. Don't start out by creating the presentation right on the slides. Instead, shift your method, and do what Swinford suggests: "Put your original outline in your speaker notes or a Word document, then transfer the important stuff to the slides." This gets back to her initial advice, that before creating the slides, you need to think through your material and figure out what is most important to show.

So, the process of turning your slides into a handout is actually reversed. You start with a detailed version of your material, away from slides, and this eventually becomes the basis for your handouts. For the slides, you slim down your material to what an audience can happily absorb as you're presenting.

There's a lot of support for the slides-are-separate-from-handouts idea. When you have time for some inspired guidance and thinking on it, check out these two great books: Presentation Zen, by Garr Reynolds (New Riders, 2008), and slide:ology, by Nancy Duarte (O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2008).

Meanwhile, take Swinford's advice to heart. "Know what you're going to say before building your slides ... That way, the slides support you."

Some middle ground

You might feel stuck in the bullet-points way. It's the habit. But still: Your audience is primary. As Garr Reynolds so aptly points out in Presentation Zen, take a bit more time with your presentation so that you don't waste the audience's time.

Geetesh Bajaj has a down-to-earth approach that can help you with the bullet-points dilemma. He says:

"Every human being is different, cultures are different, and audiences are different," and therefore presentations will be different. "There really isn't a quick recipe that will work for every presentation ..." Two things, he says, decide your presenting approach: the type of audience, and what you feel comfortable with as the speaker.

He offers these guidelines:

• "As far as possible, ascertain your audience. If they are a conservative lot, or if you are not a very confident speaker, then stay with the bullet style presentation.
• "If you have been presenting for a long time, do this: start and end your presentation with slides that don't contain bullets. Make sure your section or segue slides don't use bullets — and as far as possible, use SmartArt rather than conventional bullets. This is a great middle approach, and is known to work even with very conservative audiences.
• "If you work in an industry that's unconventional, or comprised of an audience that's receptive to change, create slide decks that include only two or three slides with bullets. As time passes, and you become more confident of this approach, get rid of the bullets.
• "Whatever approach you use, do remember Guy Kawasaki's 10-20-30 rule that says you create a presentation with 10 slides that takes 20 minutes to present. And your font point size should be at least 30 points."

And think of what Echo Swinford might say: When in doubt, put it in the handout.

About the experts

Geetesh Bajaj is a Most Valued Professional (MVP) for PowerPoint who is based in India. Geetesh creates presentations and templates professionally and is site manager for Indezine, which features hundreds of pages on PowerPoint usage, and Ppted. He recently authored the popular Cutting Edge PowerPoint 2007 for Dummies (Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2007).

Echo Swinford developed presentations and training for many years for a medical education communications company. She completed her master's degree in New Media at the Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis School of Informatics in December 2006 and works as a self-employed presentation specialist and PowerPoint trainer and consultant. Echo's first book was Fixing PowerPoint Annoyances (O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2006). She has been a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP since early 2000. Look for PowerPoint tips and tricks on her web site, echosvoice.com.

About the author

As part of the Office Online Training and Demos team, Shellie Tucker has written about PowerPoint, Word, InfoPath, Office SharePoint Server, and other Office programs. She cares about the audience, so please provide feedback!

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