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Why DId I Make A Film and Book About PowerPoint?

More than 300 million people use PowerPoint, from CEO’s to 2nd graders, from pastors to lawyers.

It has been said that PowerPoint presentations (which includes Keynote, SlideRocket, etc.) are the most used form of business communication in the world today.

If this is so, a lot of information is being lost in the noise of poor slide design and presentation.

Four years ago I made a documentary about WalMart, which had the end result of my appearing on lots of network news shows. Speaking agents started calling me because of this, and all of a sudden I had a second career as a public speaker, presenting mostly to business audiences on topics that mostly involved WalMart.

When I started presenting, I didn’t use slides at all. I just spoke. I quickly came to realize, however, that meeting planners and audiences expected a slide deck to go along with the speech.

So I started working with PowerPoint, and in the beginning I used the templates offered when you open the program, and the “Type Text Here” box. I defaulted to bullet point structure because that is what I had seen others do. My results were OK, but not great, as reflected by the scores on audience evaluations.

I then watched Steve Jobs give his presentation of the iPhone, and was struck at how much information he conveyed in his presentations, using minimal graphics and text. Sometimes he would have just one word on the screen. I started to emulate his slide design and method of delivery, getting rid of bullet points, using meaningful pictures instead of clip art, and telling a story.

Lo and behold, my audience evaluation scores went way up, and I started getting hired to speak a lot more. Plus, I enjoyed giving the speeches more. Rather than reading from a bullet-ridden slide I simply used slides to augment what I was saying, matching the visuals with my remarks, and not using notes at all.

I was so intrigued by the change in my audiences’ reception of me that I decided to try and figure out why some slide decks and methods of presentation were better at making information stick than others. Making the content stick, after all, is the goal of a presentation. My thinking was that if you cleared up all the noise of poor slide design and ineffective presentation, the “bandwidth” of the information being presented would be increased, and people would learn more.

So I spent a year traveling the country, interviewing experts about slide design and presenting for the film “Rethinking PowerPoint.” But a 90 minute film can only present so much information. What follows is the full text of the interviews from the film, and what is interesting to me are the common threads that run through the interviews as regards to the best way to design a great slide deck and then give the speech.

This is a book by a nerd for nerds, at least presentation nerds. It is roughly organized by subject, and what I decided to do was use the format Locus Magazine uses in their interviews, i.e., they let their subjects talk.

I hope you learn a lot from them. I know I did.

Ron Galloway
Producer, “Rethinking PowerPoint”
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