Kill the bullet and other boring things

Sites like Presentation Zen already talk a lot about how slides should look. So I won't go into that. But let’s talk about making slides a little creatively to alleviate audience boredom. They tend to get fed up looking at the standard bullets and zooming animations. So, how do we work with PowerPoint more as a blank canvas, open to creativity rather than using it as a templates wizard?

It is the standard layouts in PowerPoint that makes slides look the same. It stifles creativity. So the next time when you start a new PowerPoint presentation, try the following procedure:

- Got to the slide master and delete the standard text box- which contains the same old bullet points and standard formatting
- You are left only with the Title master. You can play with this and place it anywhere or change the fonts and font colours. You can easily increase the font size to anything like 60-80.

The advantages are as follows:

DIFFERENT: This gives a good starting point to work on the presentation without being bound by its standard templates. Having a single Title box also eliminates the tendency to put in bullet points or copy sentences from documents.

ATTENTION GETTING: Each slide starts to look different – thus making the audience notice that something interesting is happening. The title box can be moved around in your normal slides and placed anywhere- experiment with placing them to the left/ right/top etc. especially when you have an image accompanying the words.

MINIMAL: As the font size is quite big and space available less, you are automatically forced to pare the words to a minimum and make them more dramatic.

Finally, if you MUST absolutely put in multiple points on a slide, avoid the tendency to use the bullet points. Try and use the something different in the form of a puzzle with multiple pieces or multiple thinking bubbles or Pyramid or steps or a using a picture with different parts.