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Book Review: Beyond Bullet Points

Posted by Ken Molay January 10 2008 10:24 AM EDT

The last time I reviewed a publication on this site, I told you to rush out and spend $500. I'm taking it easier on you this time... Today's must-have book is a bargain at only $19.79 on Amazon.

The full title is a mouthful: "Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 to Create Presentations That Inform, Motivate, And Inspire" by Cliff Atkinson. Whew! I think I'll just use the abbreviation BBP as Cliff does throughout the book.

The thrust of the book is apparent from the title. Atkinson writes about how to make your PowerPoint presentations more communicative and engaging for your audience and more comfortable for you to deliver. That automatically makes it important for all of us who deliver PowerPoint-driven webinars and webcasts.

But the surprising thing is that Atkinson doesn't just give blandishments like "use more pictures, cut out data overkill." Instead, he presents a step by step procedural guide that shows you how to start with a blank slide and a topic and move through the entire creative process. I have seen vanishingly few tutorials that lay out a process for being creative. Atkinson describes how to organize your thoughts, structure the presentation flow, find appropriate words and images, and accomplish the mechanics of putting it into the software.

The BBP methodology results in a clearly defined presentation flow that leads your audience from problem to resolution within a strict time span. As an added benefit, Atkinson's system produces a presentation that is instantly adjustable for a 45-minute talk, a 15-minute overview, or a 5-minute summary. All without changing a slide.

The book is around 340 pages long, with copious illustrations, examples, and practical anecdotes. It also comes with a CD glued between the last page and the back cover, leading to my only gripe about the entire publication... I like my paperback books to be flexible. But that darned cardboard CD sleeve is fastened as a part of the page bindings with no perforations. They obviously didn't want people tearing it out in the book stores. You can't get it out of the way and it's annoying as heck.

Back to the content... (With apologies to Cliff for sidetracking the thrust of my presentation with a distraction). The author's writing style is conversational and easy to follow. He starts strong with an anecdote about the use of the BBP method in a high profile court case and leads you into the important high points of the system quickly. The latter half of the book gets much more detailed, as Atkinson delves into special cases and minutiae of the system.

I'll warn you up front... If you are part of a large enterprise organization with a Corporate Communications team that puts out standardized templates and company overview slides for building consistent presentations, you'll either have to throw out many of Atkinson's suggestions or bravely choose to make your presentations different (and probably MUCH better) than the corporate standard.

Atkinson gives very specific instructions for how key slides are "supposed" to look. You may initially bristle at his didactic statements of what constitutes proper headline writing and slide layouts. But after a bit, you realize that these are the starter kits that people need in order to get working quickly without paralyzing themselves by requiring open-ended creative decisions at each step. The author points out several times in later chapters that you can and should adjust and refine his examples to fit your needs and your personal style.

The book finishes with a hurried chapter on how to set yourself up for success when delivering your finished presentation. Some of the points made me smile, as Cliff talks about rearranging rooms and lighting to best advantage. Ah, if only the world were that perfect a place! I don't disagree with any of his statements... I just wish I could mail that chapter a month before the conference to the organizers I end up dealing with as a guest speaker!

By the way, while the CD materials and some of the PowerPoint details are tailored for PowerPoint 2007, you can safely use the methodology with earlier versions of the product and I would guess (no personal experience) that Macintosh Keynote has features that would let you approach constructing a presentation in much the same manner.

Go, buy this book. Make your presentations better. Your audiences will thank you.