Beyond Bullet Points ... A Better Way to Present

I read with great interest a new technique of creating a vibrant and engaging powerpoint presentation without the tried, or should I say tired format of the proverbial bullet points .... Cliff Atkinson has published a book called Beyond Bullet Points ... he uses a technique based on the ages old method first used by Aristotle to convey ideas by telling a story ... fast forward to the business and entertainment worlds and he parallels the use of this method to produce successful movies and to bring presentations to life ... the book is an engaging read and highlights a very structured approach to creating or should I say crafting a presentation .... when you think of all the presentations you have seen and put it into his context, you will quickly see the power of his strategy ...

Enter our old standbye Mindmanager as a tool to quickly enable the process ... the first shot is a map I created to highlight his method ... notice there is a little redundancy, but you will see why in a minute ... In this map I have taken his structure and created slides for a powerpoint export.

The second shot is the exported map in powerpoint viewing it as a slide sorter view ... this allows you to look at the flow of the presentation and follow like a storyboard ... I see there will be two options to create the final presentation from this framework ... I can either modify the map and export it or work in powerpoiont and do the editing there ... if you notice how I have the Act slides to kind of summarize the following slides, normally to make a presentation flow, you would take or hide those slides in the final version ... take a look at this book and his website for a better explanation fo the process ... I created this mindmap to help me along, and as always, I am back to our reliable tool to simplify almost any task undertaken ...

I am preparing a presentation to be shown in a couple weeks, so I will add more to this subject as I go along ....