Source: Nintendo

For one of my recent seminars, I decided to challenge myself.  As an admitted follower of Presentation Zen, over the past few months I have been reducing the amount of bullet points in my presentations.  For my seminar on effective meetings, I thought to myself, “What if I could make this PowerPoint slide show without a single bullet point?”

Much to my surprise, I was able to do it.  For this post, I’ll show how I evolved the most bullet-point-laden part of my slide show into something much more captivating and memorable.

The First Draft

The slide above was my first attempt at conveying what I wanted to say to the audience.  Imagine looking at this, listening to me speaking, and referring to a handout simultaneously.  This is a textbook case of information overload.

The Second Draft

In this draft, I managed to ditch the bullet points and spruce things up a bit.  Regardless, there is still too much going on here.

The Final Draft

It turned out that the only way to convey my message was to divide one slide into four.  The time spent working through all of this ensured that I could confidently explain all of these talking points without text-heavy slides.  Just in case, however, I included any information that I was worried about forgetting in the presentation handout.

So, which presentation would you rather see?