PowerPoint doesn’t have to hurt. It has a hidden good side that can help you break free of its constraints.
Like other feature-laden products, everything that makes PowerPoint “easy to use” (endless options and wizards) often hurts more than it helps. It offers presenters a helping hand, then gives them a black eye (and kicks their audience in the shins) when:
- Cluttered slides and transitions overshadow content
- Complex ideas are reduced to bullet points
- Presenters read what the audience sees
Irritation with the conventions and constraints of PowerPoint drives people to camouflage the pain with flashy graphics or transitions. Audiences and presenters suffer even more.
When faced with problems like this at MAYA, we often solve them by thinking of new ways to use existing products. We discovered an unconventional way to make PowerPoint surprisingly useful and flexible by using the slide and notes views to support each other.
For most people, PowerPoint means “slides.” Presenters spend most of their energy fussing with slides because those are what the audience sees. (See Figure 1.)
We designed our slide view to be primarily a single image with minimal descriptive text. Audiences enjoy viewing compelling images and illustrations instead of a word-for-word backdrop to what the presenter is saying. (See Figure 2.)
You might think your material is different — that you have to show words or numbers. Maybe so, but remember that a picture is worth a thousand words. Try using a metaphorical image that gets your point across. You can still keep your words and numbers, but move the bulk of your material to the “notes” view.
Surprisingly few presenters use or know about the notes view of PowerPoint. (Click on “View” in PowerPoint’s menu bar to find it.) The notes view offers much more room for text than slides alone. We designed our notes view like a printed page of a book, with the slide as an illustration above a block of descriptive text. (See Figure 3.) We’ve even matched the design of our PowerPoint template to the Microsoft Word and Adobe Illustrator templates that we use for proposals, reports, and project deliverables.
When used this way, the notes view functions not only as a script for the presenter, but also as a well-designed printed document. No matter how it’s distributed, our material is complete, readable, and compelling — even without a presenter.
One of our clients struggled with a PowerPoint presentation that was a jumble of fonts, charts, tables, statistics, and bullet points. MAYA designed a new template for them, using the approach described above. I can’t show the final template to you because of our client’s proprietary content, but it has paid off for them considerably. As they use it to pitch business worth millions of dollars, the new template helps to reassure their customers about the consistency and quality of our client’s product.
If using PowerPoint puts evil thoughts into your own head, try this approach. You’ll feel like a genius — and look like one, too.