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Great book with tips on how to make your presentations deliver the messgae you want without putting the audience to sleep.
Beyond Bullet Points helped me to create my very first and very successful PowerPoint presentation before an audience of 80 people. What a feeling. The layout of the form helped me realize just how little I could really fit in the alloted 30 minutes, which was very helpful.
Beyond Bullet Points helped me to untangle my thinking into an organized, powerful presentation. In addition to Beyond Bullet Points, I referred to the book Presentation Zen for inspiration for the look of several of the content slides. Until I found the book, I was grasping at how to synthesize the vast amount of details that went into a complex two-year project I worked on.
By viewing the presentation as a series of scenes and using the gray, graphically pleasing divider slides for transitions, I was able to lead my audience through the story of the project's development to a powerful conclusion. I read and highlighted the book, downloaded the the storyboard form, and even took the webinar available from the Beyond Bullet Points web site to help refine the approach of my talk. It took several tries with the storyboard form before the presentation took shape.
I received a lot of positive feedback verbally after the presentation, but it wasn't really necessary -- I could tell throughout that I had the audience in the palm of my hand. Thank you, Cliff.
Doesn't worth reading the book.The author does basically 2 things: 1) Show you how to use the paradigm of Hollywood to produce movies into PowerPoint using a 3 Acts template (this approach doesn't work for most of the business situations). 2) Promote heavily his web site for you to purchase additional material (not included on the CD).This approach suggest that people is not capable to absorb and retain information unless you "chunk it" for them.The contents is redudant and the book could have been written in 50% of the pages.I have never returned a book but I did it with this one.
I talk to marketers. I recommend it). As I transition from being a Producer/Team Manager to a Product Manager, my entire job has become communication and translation. The "pretty picture" is what gets people excited. I talk to technologists. I talk to our customers/end-users. We are all working on the same product with, hopefully, the same goals and objectives but need to know different things to be effective.
They are useful tools for honing in on themes and concepts and move away from minutiae and edge cases. Over the last 6 months (and, I guess, really it started about a year ago), my work life has become a lot of creating decks and then presenting them to people. At The Mouse, the "pretty picture" is powerful. Understanding the difference between creating confidence and excitement and spending time and effort on things that are cute but not necessarily moving.This was my third choice of books to read behind Slide:ology and Presentation Zen. In the world I work in now, though, visual cues are way more important. It sparks ideas and action and momentum. I talk to artists. I talk to business analysts.
I talk to sales people. They are conversation starters as well as keep those chats on track. The templates for presentation construction are great. Give me some bit of control over what actions those images ignite. What Beyond Bullet Points was helpful in doing for me was to help give context to the "pretty picture".
I talk to project managers. I often use "The Deck" to convey that.And, so, the art of creating great presentations is something I must be better at if I want to succeed in this new role. I haven't had much need for PowerPoint in the past. I actually really like these kinds of presentations. In fact, the most compelling and useful pieces of information came in it's earliest chapters and on it's accompanying CD and website.
Our point of difference is always when we tie compelling creative vision with strong business objectives.I didn't read all of Beyond Bullet Points. The tips and tricks around using some of the more nuanced features of PPT (like slide sorting view and notes view) continue to be endlessly helpful. What I found, though, is that what I'm looking for isn't really about presentation construction, though. It's not that Beyond Bullet Points was bad (the exact opposite in fact.
I talk to executives. New ways to think about storytelling in a different medium. It's my job to make sure everyone stays on the same path with the same vision. I'm a wannabe writer more comfortable with Word or a Rich Text Editor telling stories with flowery language and cute turns of phrase.
It's about elegant ways of making a point. it's just that I want more.Get me to the advanced class.
I would be laughed out of the room if I was to attempt to give a presentation that strictly followed the guidelines of this book. This book is good in that it covers the basics of ensuring that the slides and the presentation deliver a straight forward, single thread "story," but anyone with any experience will have learned this capability very early on. One liners with emotional pictures will not win over an educated audience on any subject with any depth. The problem is that the book maintains that audiences can not absorb material unless the material is presented in the style of the Sesame Street TV show. Every slide must be extremely simple and very entertaining--the premise of the Sesame Street show. --Cliff can you imagine going into the JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff) in the pentagon and giving them a presentation based on this book. You wouldn't make it past the second slide before you would be cut off and dismissed.--
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