Books | Book Excerpts
PowerPoint Makeover 7: No Bullets Presentation
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by Geetesh Bajaj - published on this site on November 29th 2007
This book extract is from PowerPoint
2007: Complete Makeover Kit by
Geetesh Bajaj and Echo Swinford.
This book is not as much about reading as it is about
seeing and doing! That’s why it's called a
kit. Full-color pages show you exactly how your slides
will look as you follow the makeover steps, and all
presentations in various stages of the makeover are
on the accompanying CD. Each of the eight makeovers
has been carefully chosen so it’s relevant to
anyone who has ever used PowerPoint. And if you just
upgraded to PowerPoint 2007, this book gives you a
great introduction to the new version of the program,
along with ample experience in using all the new features.
I wish to thank Lisa Jacobson
Brown of Pearson
Education for
facilitating the permission to extract.
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About This Makeover
Apply
a Clean Theme
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About This Makeover
For this makeover, I used an award-winning
presentation created by the team of Scott Schwertly and Cheree
Moore at Ethos3 Communications (www.ethos3.com). I wish to thank
them for allowing me to use their presentation.
Unlike in other
makeovers in this book, this presentation is a concept makeover
rather than a new-features-in-PowerPoint makeover.
This presentation
uses no bullets, and often uses pictures instead of words to create "concept
slides." A picture of a cup of coffee represents coffee much
better than just the word "coffee" because so much more
is visible in a picture: There's the cup, the froth in the coffee,
and the color of the coffee itself. Thus pictures engage the audience—people
can form their own stories, and they will pay more attention to
the presentation because they are more involved this way.
The way
you present your message can be more important than the message
itself. This is especially true if you want to use PowerPoint to
illustrate a concept rather than just show some numbers. True,
this no-bullets style of presentation might not be suitable (or
even possible) all the time, but if you used this style all the
time, it might not be as effective. Thus, the secret is to use
this style in the opening or closing slides of a conventional presentation,
and when the situation permits, you also can use it in an entire
presentation, as we did in this makeover.
Remember that this presentation
style does not reduce the number of slides you'll have to make—every
slide that includes a title and four bullet points now must be
changed to five slides: one for the title and one concept slide
for each individual bullet!
Figure 8.1 shows you the "before" sample
slides. Although the text looks crisp and clear, the presentation
itself lacks life because it tries to tell a story using just a
few words. The words that are used get lost because there are so
many of them on a single slide, and I haven't even come to the
visuals yet.
Figure 8.1 These were created using one of the built-in design
themes contained in PowerPoint 2007.
To see how much difference a few words and visuals can make, go
no further than Figure 8.2. This is the same content presented
in slides that build on each other using a story sequence style.
Figure 8.2 Nothing more, nothing less, and just enough!
Apply a Clean Theme
The first thing you need to do to make over this presentation
is apply a clean theme or template. A clean theme is a simple slide
design that includes a plain white background—think of it
as an empty canvas. Applying a clean theme allows the pictures
to stand out well. To apply the theme, follow these steps:
- Open the nobullets_00.pptx presentation from the Makeover 07\Steps
folder on the CD.
- Click the Design tab on the Ribbon, and
mouse over the themes that you see in Figure 8.3. Click on
the theme thumbnail when the ToolTip says Office Theme. Even
if you can't see the ToolTips, this theme is easy to locate
because it's the only one that has a plain white background.
Figure 8.3 Apply a
clean theme.
- All the slides in the presentation now
will show a white background. Save your presentation.
Back
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