Why Most Powerpoint Presentations Suck

THIRD EDITION: Did you learn PowerPoint in 30 minutes? Join the crowd...most people get no more than a half-hour of training time with PowerPoint before they are tasked with making what is likely to be a first impression of themselves or their company. This book is for earnest presenters and presentation designers who want to escape the perils that entrap so many who turn to PowerPoint for their presentations.

FOREWORD BY GUY KAWASAKI Presentation designer and internationally acclaimed communications expert Garr Reynolds, creator of the most popular Web site on presentation design and delivery on the Net — presentationzen.com — shares his experience in a provocative mix of illumination, inspiration, education, and guidance that will change the way you think about making presentations with PowerPoint or Keynote. Presentation Zen challenges the conventional wisdom of making "slide presentations" in today’s world and encourages you to think differently and more creatively about the preparation, design, and delivery of your presentations. Garr shares lessons and perspectives that draw upon practical advice from the fields of communication and business. Combining solid principles of design with the tenets of Zen simplicity, this book will help you along the path to simpler, more effective presentations.

Sometimes when things get really bad, surgery is required. Bad Powerpoint* (and boring presentations) are everywhere! it appears that they have almost become the norm and very few people seem to want to talk about it. It doesn’t have to be that way. Bad presentations are costly. They can cost money, jobs and reputations, don’t let your slides ruin your pitch. In this funny, cut-to-the-chase and down-to-earth book professional speaker Lee Jackson will wean you, and your workplace off bad slides forever. He’ll also teach you how good presentation slides can work for you and help you stand out from the crowd. Using these simple techniques we can kill death by bullet-point once and for all. JOIN THE FIGHT TODAY! (N.B. This book is a colour paperback and illustrated with full colour slides.) “ Lee takes a clever and refreshing approach to presentation mastery. ” Nancy Duarte – author of ‘Slide:ology’, ‘Resonate’ and principal of Duarte (creators of the slides/visuals for Academy Award-winning film, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’) “ Powerpoint Surgery is an invaluable resource...and I highly recommend it... ” Jeremy Waite – Head of Social Strategy, Adobe EMEA “ Lee Jackson takes PowerPoint presentations from boring to brilliant. ” Alan Stevens FPSA – Past President Global Speakers Federation and co-author of ‘The Exceptional Speaker “ ...a masterclass of creating sublime slides & presentations, but be warned, you may never be able to sit through a presentation again without thinking of Lee Jackson! ” Geoff Ramm – President 2013 Professional Speaking Association UK and Ireland “Jackson has got a bl***y nerve asking me to write a testimonial for his book. You see, I am a proudly militant Anti-PowerPoint Bigot, but somehow, he has turned the Indefensible into the Indispensable! ” Graham Davies – best selling author of ‘The Presentation Coach’

The guide that proves your meetings don't have to suck! There's a big dull elephant in the boardroom: this meeting! Most of the millions of meetings held in the world today are a monumental waste of time and talent. Worse still, most of the so-called solutions and books for boring meetings are twice as boring. Boring Meetings Suck provides tips and tactics to deliver "Get-In, Get-It-Done, or Get-Out" style meetings, while also tackling what most prefer to avoid; that you don't have to BE in charge of a meeting to TAKE charge of a meeting. This entertaining and take-no-prisoners guide is full of easily deployed SRDs?Suckification Reduction Devices?that will help you make your next meeting both efficient and effective. Empowers attendees to politely speak up and get a meeting back on track, or graciously get out, without being fired Shows how hosts can capitalize on technology, learning to crowd-source problems and increase participation Defines surefire methods to get meetings to start and end on time and not have the speaker read the slides STOPS over-invitation syndrome The author has appeared before many major corporate clients, and was named a "Top Business Professional Under 40" by American City Business Journals Your meetings do not have to bore, nor must they suck. Instead, get the winning techniques in Boring Meetings Suck, and make your meetings awesome in their engagement and productivity, or stop having them!

Advanced Presentations by Design overturns much of the conventional wisdom and practice for creating presentations. Based on over 200 research studies from the fields of communication, marketing, psychology, multimedia, and law, it provides fact-based answers to critical questions about presentation design, including how to adapt your presentation to different audience personality preferences, what role your data should play and how much of it you need, how to turn your data into a story, and how to design persuasive yet comprehensible visual layouts.

Whether you are a university professor, researcher at a think tank, graduate student, or analyst at a private firm, chances are that at some point you have presented your work in front of an audience. Most of us approach this task by converting a written document into slides, but the result is often a text-heavy presentation saddled with bullet points, stock images, and graphs too complex for an audience to decipher—much less understand. Presenting is fundamentally different from writing, and with only a little more time, a little more effort, and a little more planning, you can communicate your work with force and clarity. Designed for presenters of scholarly or data-intensive content, Better Presentations details essential strategies for developing clear, sophisticated, and visually captivating presentations. Following three core principles—visualize, unify, and focus—Better Presentations describes how to visualize data effectively, find and use images appropriately, choose sensible fonts and colors, edit text for powerful delivery, and restructure a written argument for maximum engagement and persuasion. With a range of clear examples for what to do (and what not to do), the practical package offered in Better Presentations shares the best techniques to display work and the best tactics for winning over audiences. It pushes presenters past the frustration and intimidation of the process to more effective, memorable, and persuasive presentations.

Through an engaging and humorous narrative, Peter Coughter presents the tools he designed to help advertising and marketing professionals develop persuasive presentations that deliver business. Readers will learn how to develop skills to create the perfect presentation.

Learn the Secrets Needed to Master PowerPoint for Training As a successful facilitator, you know the importance of the resources in your professional toolkit. How you engage your audience and improve learning can be affected by how well you use them. But mastery of PowerPoint evades many. Feedback on presentations can range from “What was the point?” to “That changed my life.” Most, though, fall closer to the former. If you are looking for a guide to the PowerPoint practices that will push your presentations into the latter category, look no further. A Trainer's Guide to PowerPoint: Best Practices for Master Presenters is Mike Parkinson's master class on the art of PowerPoint. While Parkinson wants you to understand how amazing a tool PowerPoint is, he's the first to tell you that there is no magic button to make awesome slides. There are, however, proven processes and tools that deliver successful PowerPoint content each and every time you use them. In this book he shares them, detailing his award-winning PowerPoint process and guiding you through three phases of presentation development—discover, design, and deliver. What's more, Parkinson is a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP—most valuable professional—an honorific bestowed by Microsoft on those with “very deep knowledge of Microsoft products and services.” He shares not only his tips and best practices for presentation success, but also those from several of his fellow MVPs. Parkinson invites you to master PowerPoint as a tool—just like a paintbrush and paint—and to realize that the tool doesn't make the art, you do.

Creating Effective Presentations: Staff Development with Impact presents a comprehensive approach to creating compelling, interactive staff development sessions. The book is highly practical, summing up important research in the field of visual communication, graphic design, and presentation skills as they apply specifically to those who teach and coach their fellow educators. In short, conversational chapters that include real-life examples, Peery gives quick lessons on planning each aspect of a resonant presentation. This book is filled with basic tips about making PowerPoint software work better for you and delivering a succesful presentation. If you do more than a few presentations a year for other adults who are involved in education_and you want your ideas to 'stick' like never before_then this book is a must-read!