Share via

My new Bing slide deck

  • Article

View more presentations from Steve Clayton.

I love PowerPoint and I hate PowerPoint. It’s a brilliant tool for aiding communication but too many people use it as a crutch. They fill their slides with bullet after bullet that is there to help them not their audience. The trick is you shouldn’t be up there presenting if you need a crutch. You ought to be passionate and knowledgeable enough about your topic not to need the crutch. Garr Reynolds can tell you all about it and his Naked Presentations handout is a great resource.

What’s my point? My point is I learnt this quite a while back through hard personal experience. Because of that, I now go out of my way to try to produce better slides. Slides that gets people’s attention; slides that don’t bore the sh*t out of people. Your audience deserves it. Occasionally I get asked to help put together some slides for an even and I usually spend way more time on this than people may guess. I start out with a list of word. One word per slide. The I go find an image that represents that word. It’s not exactly unique as I’ve seen a tonne of people use this format – everyone from Seth Godin to Adrian Newey. It turns out to be a  great way to break down the message or story you want to tell by thinking what is the one word that encapsulates each slide. That leaves you to tell the story rather than having the whole thing on a slide full of bullets.

The slide deck above is one I put together for an internal client last week and struggled for a while with how to put it together…in fact for hours until the wee hours of the morning. Then I saw a slide from a Steve Ballmer presentation and the idea to include a Bing search box hit me. It would provide a new look, a cue for the presenter and crucially help people who saw the deck later on without the benefit of the presenter delivering it. The last point is probably the main failing of the “single image” format I’ve used a lot of.

So there you have it….what I hope is a simple and elegant hybrid of bullets (the Bing box) with images to deliver a powerful message. Oh…the powerful message bit is 99.9% down to the presenter by the way.

Let me know what you think and if you’re a Softie, drop me an email (stevecla) if you’d like a copy of the slides with an editable Bing box as it took some time to get that right with transparent images etc

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 29, 2009
    nice job - liking your style! It just reminded me i have an image rich presentation of my own to upload to slide share. Have to admit the image and video search parts of bing are the bits i like the most. Could do with some way of showing creative commons somehow though. Maybe now that bing and yarhoo have done a deal it'll be even more integrated with flickr images!

  • Anonymous
    July 29, 2009
    Steve, nice post. PPT is a very powerful - and my personal favourite - productivity app. So it frustrates me when I see it so regularly mis-used, primarily through a lack of basic education. The main issue is that there are TWO common, but distinct, usage-scenarios for PPT that must be approached very differently. The first is when you are using PPT to communicate detailed plans and proposals. For many years now, PPT has gradually been replacing Word as the de facto way in which business plans are created, reviewed and shared. Not just at Microsoft, but at most companies. For that type of PPT usage, lots of detail per slide is both valuable and relevant because it is usually a "roundtable/heads down/let's review and debate" type of meeting, where details matter. The second is the type of one-to-many audience-based presentation that is primarily designed to inspire/provoke. The primary goal here is to communicate a SMALL number of PROFOUND thoughts. That is why your advice on 1 word/message (supported by a great image) is great for that type of scenario. The problems occur when people assume you can successfully use PPT in the same way across both these two scenarios. That is when and why we experience "Death By PowerPoint" at conferences etc. It is not really a fault of the tool itself, more the user's understanding of its appropriate usage. Andy

  • Anonymous
    August 03, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 03, 2009
    Totally agree, it is another way to put yourself your audience shoes. Besides people doesn't care how much you know until they know how much you care and having a presentation intended for the audience and not you will definitely get the action going. Signature: Telling stories with right <a href="http://presentationstoryboarding.com/">storyboarding presentation</a> together with <a href="http://presentationstoryboarding.com/">PowerPoint presentation</a> is like owning a printing press and printing your own currency.