Beyond Bullet Points

What Hacker News says

1. leakycapJun 2025
   I'd recommend Beyond Bullet Points by B. Atkinson; it's a book about PowerPoint but teaches you how to synthesize presentations, including videos and in-person presentations.

   As far as career upgrades, this book was decisive for me in making the lightbulb go off so I could share my vision with others and have them see it, too.

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2. DanielBMarkhamSep 2011
   I've become a big fan of Beyond Bullet-points.

   I had a large client where I was doing a lot of Agile training. As part of that, I created a series of workshops around putting together a backlog when starting a project. There was no text -- it was simply pictures and me telling a story with them.

   Two very interesting things happened. First, the students loved it. I'd talk/present for ten minutes or so, then we'd do stuff. Repeat and rinse. There was never a big wall of text for them to absorb, and I never read from anything. They were always doing stuff. And since it was stuff related to their specific project, even better.

   The second thing was completely unexpected. The customer had a very mixed response to my material! It seems that they wanted something with a lot of text so that they could "teach" it themselves. A narrative, story-focused presentation that was integrated into the team's work was simply too difficult. They wanted a presentation that read like a textbook.

   As far as being a good consultant goes, I'm not sure if I did a good thing or a bad thing in terms of the customer's long-term goals. But as far as the people I'm helping? I'm sticking to pictures and stories. Nobody wants to live through another Powerpoint hell, and I have no desire to put anybody through it again.

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3. DanielBMarkhamApr 2010
   The article alludes to this: there's an entire subculture at DoD dedicated to creating PowerPoint decks. Lots of really high-paid contractors have the main job of creating PowerPoints for senior command. The whole place runs off of PowerPoint.

   After I read Beyond Bullet Points, my opinion of presentations totally changed. Back of the Napkin helped some, but BBP really ingrained in me the right way to do a deck.

   Now when I teach or present, I have a brief deck full of pictures and conveying a simple, reasoned discussion not involving a lot of data.

   What happens is that the PPT takes the place of the thinking that goes into analysis. That's really, really bad. Instead, do the thinking, solve the problem, make a recommendation, come up with the couple of points you have to teach, THEN create a multimedia presentation around it. Presentations are like movies -- people absorb them differently than a book. Too often the people making PowerPoints are trying to write a book or impress us with their knowledge of graphics, and the information overload leads to "death by PowerPoint"

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4. johnmApr 2008
   (A) Presentation Zen both the book (that came out recently) and the blog: http://www.presentationzen.com/ and Beyond Bullet Points, http://beyondbulletpoints.com/ the book and online seminars.

   Yes, both of them are primarily focused on "static" presentations, however the focus on the telling a good story through your demonstration is the point. In presenting Krugle at DEMO06 (and winning a DEMOGod award, woohoo!), the biggest failing we saw in many of the other presentations was the fact that the "story" was a confusing, convoluted mess.

   (B) Spend a lot more time building and practicing your presentations/demonstrations than you think. Video yourself is great if you can do it but just standing up and actually running through the entire presentation/demo repeatedly goes a long ways.

   (C) For online/web demos, I always build a completely usable, static presentation (in Keynote/PowerPoint) using lots of e.g., diagrams and screenshots so that the presentation still works for the audience even if the network/server is down/slow.

   (D) Have a personality -- and bend it towards your audience. I.e., a presentation needs to be engaging/interesting to the audience. I.e., think at least as much about entertaining (in the best possible way) as you do about being e.g., informative.

   (E) Have fun!

   Hope this helps, John

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5. johnmApr 2007
   Two good resources: PresentationZen blog (http://www.presentationzen.com/ ) and Beyond Bullet Points book (http://www.beyondbullets.com/ ).
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