August, 2007
Reviewed by Michael S. Hines
Microsoft Press, 2006, 223 pp
ISBN-10: 0-7356-2052-0
Along with the review of "Winning Presentations" this month we are including a review of "Beyond Bullet Points" to aid in your preparations for our International CMG Conference (or any presentation you might have to do).
In "Beyond Bullet Points" Mr. Atkinson (Cliff) is on a one person mission to eliminate bullet points from PowerPoint presentations. While bullet points are easy to create, he is of the opinion that they are hard for audiences to understand. Instead he believes we should take our lead from the world of multimedia - Hollywood - and develop presentations as if we were writing a script for a movie. He maintains the Hollywood approach dates back to the time of the Greek philosopher Aristotle using his ideas about plot, character, and three-act structure in presentations.
In order to demonstrate this approach, he creates a case study in Chapter 1 that is carried throughout the book - an assignment to take a bullet point PowerPoint slide set and rework it according to Cliff's laws of "Beyond Bullet Points" to produce a presentation that informs, motivates and inspires.
The three acts are developed over Chapters 2 and 3. Chapter 2 demonstrates how to "Set Up the Story" in Act I. In addition, Chapter 2 introduces us to the Storyboard Template (in MS Word) which is used to build the presentation and can be used to create PowerPoint slides directly. Chapter 3 demonstrates how to set up Act 2 - "Develop the Action" (in three points); and Act 3 - "Framing the Resolution".
Chapter 4 show how to use Storyboarding to enhance slides.
Chapter 5 extends the Storyboarding technique by adding style to your presentation.
Screen shots, Diagrams, and Quantitative Information presentation in PowerPoint are illustrated in ‘Expanding Graphical Options' in Chapter 6.
All the material is brought together in Chapter 7 - "Bringing Your Story to Life". The highlights are - remove distractions; Practice-Practice-Practice; and Dialog with the Audience.
The book covers a lot of material in the 223 pages. Obtaining and using the Storyboard Template along with the book would be a worthwhile endeavor. After using this method a few times, Cliff encourages you to ‘ad lib' with the tool to bring about some interesting changes to approach without breaking the model. By using his ‘Storyboarding' approach to presentations in Three Acts, you actually can move "Beyond Bullet Points" and produce presentations that inform, motivate, and inspire. And you might hold audience attention and convey your ideas better in the process.
Personal tip: I buy a lot of my books through Amazon.com, and I've found that buying used books offers a significant discount over new books and the quality of books I've received has been excellent. Your mileage may vary (YMMV).
Also, CMG has prepared guidelines for PowerPoint presentations for speakers at the CMG Conference. See "Power Point Guidelines for CMG: Speaker Notes & Presentation Tips" at http://www.cmg.org/conference/cmg2007/PowerPoint_Guidelines_for_CMG.ppt