Seth Godin shares some useful insights on why bullets don’t work in presentation in his post Most presentations aren’t bullet proof. He says bullets don’t save time and don’t make easier to remember things.
Don’t miss navigating to the link to his bulletless solution in his earlier post.
I find it so hard to resist using bullets in my presentations, though I must admit the most remembered presentation I made didn’t have bullets. There must be some truth to what he says. Interestingly when I blogged about that presentation, I was inspired by Seth at that time too.
Dumping bullets from a presentation? Not a realistic idea, or that’s what I thought after first going through this post. Then I went through the embedded presentation which proves me wrong. It makes me recall the presentations given by one of the visiting faculties at our B-school, Mr Mohit Chhabra. His presentations used to have single words per slide and each slide had a theme or a concept expressed through minimum words or images.
My idea is that such presentations can be created to explain ideas, concepts, branding related information or similar things. For things more descriptive in nature, like the service offerings of a company or explaining a project undertaken for a client, it is imperative to use bullets because the audience would be interested in going through the details. This can also be helpful when the presentation is shared with the audience for future reference. They might need a descriptive presentation to discuss with their peers or other stakeholders. Thus it is the type of presentation and what exactly does it aim to achieve, that decides whether bullets can be dumped or not!