Monthly Archives: May 2008

Breaking the rule – go for it!

The whole idea of NOT having bullet points in your presentation is to tell your story as if you are showing a movie. Your story has a setting, cast of characters, starting point, end point and how to get from starting point to the end point. These make up your first FIVE slides. (see below for a short video of the concept). Once you have defined the theme of your story, you are FREE to tell your story the way YOU want to.

You should not be bound by some artificial rules that say you must have three acts with each act containing three scenes. In other words, the rule says that you are supposed to tell your story by focusing on only three main ideas and if you must explain each idea, you should not use more than three points to explain it.

I say BREAK that rule!

Why? What if you have to tell a story about the Ten Commandments? Which three commandments do you focus on? which seven do you discard? Will you be stricken by lightning?

You should use as many slides as you need to present your ideas. If you had 100 points you wanted to make and you had jammed them into 10 slides with 10 bullet points each, now is the time to break these out into 100 slides. Each slide will represent each one of your ideas. I promise you – the PowerPoint police will not come and arrest you for having 100 slides or 1000 slides.

Your content is the same as before except now you are presenting the same 100 ideas with 100 slides and this time around you audience is no longer in a coma.