Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft® Office PowerPoint® 2007 to Create Presentations That Inform, Motivate, and Inspire |  | Author: Cliff Atkinson
Publisher: Microsoft Press
List Price: $29.99
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Rating:  28 reviews
Sales Rank: 5282
Media: Paperback
Pages: 368
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 7.3 x 1.3
MPN: 9780735623873
ISBN: 0735623872
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.58
EAN: 9780735623873
ASIN: 0735623872
Publication Date: October 10, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Transform your presentations--and boost your impact--with practical, easy-to-apply techniques for using PowerPoint 2007. Author Cliff Atkinson is a presentation-skills expert who is helping revolutionize the way Fortune 500 companies design and deliver their critical presentations. Even major news media reported the contribution of Cliff's techniques to a verdict in a high-profile trial. In his highly-regarded, popular book BEYOND BULLET POINTS--now fully updated for PowerPoint 2007--Cliff shares his innovative three-step method that helps you unlock the amazing story buried in those bullet-riddled slides. He guides you, step by step, as you discover how to combine the tenets of classic storytelling with the power of projected media to create a rich, engaging experience. With easy-to-use templates, advanced tips, and plenty of illustrations and examples, you'll learn techniques to help you clarify, visualize, and present your ideas so that your audience will remember your important message. This newly revised, popular guide now includes a CD with sample PowerPoint 2007 files and graphics.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 28
 Waste of Money October 20, 2009
Francisco del Rosal
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
 It does go Beyond Bullet Points...but not that much further. October 4, 2009
Jason Toney (Valley Village, CA USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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. I actually really like these kinds of presentations. They are useful tools for honing in on themes and concepts and move away from minutiae and edge cases. They are conversation starters as well as keep those chats on track. As I transition from being a Producer/Team Manager to a Product Manager, my entire job has become communication and translation. I talk to executives. I talk to technologists. I talk to artists. I talk to sales people. I talk to marketers. I talk to project managers. I talk to business analysts. 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. It's my job to make sure everyone stays on the same path with the same vision. 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'm a wannabe writer more comfortable with Word or a Rich Text Editor telling stories with flowery language and cute turns of phrase. In the world I work in now, though, visual cues are way more important. At The Mouse, the "pretty picture" is powerful. The "pretty picture" is what gets people excited. It sparks ideas and action and momentum. What Beyond Bullet Points was helpful in doing for me was to help give context to the "pretty picture". Give me some bit of control over what actions those images ignite. 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. In fact, the most compelling and useful pieces of information came in it's earliest chapters and on it's accompanying CD and website. The templates for presentation construction are great. 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 about elegant ways of making a point. New ways to think about storytelling in a different medium. 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. It's not that Beyond Bullet Points was bad (the exact opposite in fact. I recommend it.) it's just that I want more.
Get me to the advanced class.
Presenting to a Sesame Street audience September 13, 2009
M. Sekora (texas)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
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.
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. One liners with emotional pictures will not win over an educated audience on any subject with any depth.
--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.--
Great approach, but could be more concise September 1, 2009
J. Schulte (Bay Area, CA)
Like most business professionals today, I live and think in Power Point almost every day and suffer through terrible presentations almost hourly. I purchased this book, along with Presentation Zen and Slideology, after checking various blogs and other reviews.
Beyond Bullet Points presents an approach to organizing and structuring a presentation that I find useful and effective. It draws on basic narrative structures found in film to create a framework for organizing a presentation into a story. The genius lies in helping people understand that presentations are a story, and need a setting, a protagonist, a conflict, a resolution, and action. This book explains each element and provides lots of guidance for why they are powerful and how to use that framework for creating presentations that get people to take action.
Also very effective were the suggestions on how to create presentations starting with outlines and speaker notes prior to creating slides. When I took this approach at work, it was incredibly useful because it helped people separate the story I would tell from the actual slides, so that for the first time the presentation was more of a performance and less of a barrage of bullet points.
On the negative side, this book is not a very good reference for those who are looking for more help with the graphics of their presentations. This is not a design book. And I think that the book could be about 100 pages shorter than it is.
Overall, I find this to be the best book I've found so far on how to present with presentation software. It has a great overall approach, lots of examples and resources (both online and in the CD).
Tell a story whose main character is your audience June 9, 2009
Paul A. Baker (Madison, Wis., US)
Atkinson's book challenges all us presenters to set aside our old habits and assumptions. Without getting too technical, Atkinson weaves cognitive science into the how-tos of using PowerPoint. He discusses research realities that can improve our presentations, including
* Help your audience learn by 'chunking' new information.
* Presentations do not occur in a paper medium. They are like a movie, with a visual track and an audio track (your narration). The two streams of information should not copy each other; they should complement each other.
* When creating a show, write out your full narration in the off-screen text box in Notes Page view. It's your *private* TelePrompter.
* Use a story structure. Your presentation should have a beginning, middle, and end. No slide is without specific meaning, context, and sequence.
* The main character in the story should not be your company or your research. You are asking your *audience* to take some action, or to believe something.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 28
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