Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft® Office PowerPoint® 2007 to Create Presentations That Inform, Motivate, and Inspire

List Price: $29.99 Discount Price: $17.22

Customer Reviews:

Genuinely novel and helpful tips? Brilliant! [Posted on 2008-03-29]
I'm a real cynic about books like this, since they tend to be 99% fluff and 1% practical advice. I was very pleasantly surprised by Beyond Bullet Points. It outlines a great way of presenting, and it does so very clearly. I especially appreciated that it brings in sound educational and psychological research to show why things should be done a certain way, such as the discussion on how typical presentations lead to interference on the audio channel of human information processing. (Don't worry - the language is completely non-technical in this book!)

Getting this book and using the technique in it will make you a very impressive presenter, and spare your audience the soul-crushing boredom that usually results from PowerPoint presentations. Be warned that it isn't "easy" - the technique prompts you to think about your presentation more than you may be used to. Nothing good is completely easy!

Best yet from Cliff Atkinson... I'm now a complete fan! [Posted on 2008-04-03]
I recommend "Beyond Bullet Points" in my class all the time. I continually have people coming up to me and asking where my slides came from or how I go about creating them. While I cannot say that I stick to the BBP process strictly, I do use its concepts heavily in my slides. This is why I tell these people ot start with BBP.

Well, I just picked up my copy of the 2007 version of BBP last week and wow! This is what it should have always been. It was good before, but the difference between the original BBP and the 2007 versions is as big as the difference between PowerPoint 2003 and PowerPoint 2007. Cliff has provided much more in the way of research-based findings that support the BBP methodology. He has also, I feel, done a much better job of explaining the whole process.

If you are totally new to BBP, you will understand the process and the reason it works much better with this new version that those of us who are old timers now. If you've used the first book or were even turned off by the first book, I highly recommend taking a look at this one. I don't believe you'll regret it.

200 pages of fluff [Posted on 2008-05-20]
This book is awful. It promises to show you how to create powerpoint presentations that motivate and inspire. But instead, it gives you a couple of pages teaching you the author's format (basically, a Hollywood script, in 3 Acts) then spends the rest of the book telling you how to create hidden slides, how to insert clip-art, and tons of "filler" pages of "top 10 things to remember" that are, frankly, common sense.

The Hollywood format, does look somewhat useful for creating a dialog with your audience and the supporting slides for that conversation. But it seems the author had about 20 pages of content, but needed to create another 180 pages so he could sell a book. And in that 180 pages he fails to discuss important topics like how to summarize ideas crisply on a slide, and instead pushes all the content into the notes section, and uses the slide as a place to put clip art of a sailboat, or something equally pointless. All the content in the notes section? Why not just use a Word document then?

I returned this book to Barnes & Noble, disgusted by the shallow treatment of an important topic. I almost never return books, but this so completely failed to fulfill the book's promise that I felt swindled.

Just what I needed to get energized again! [Posted on 2008-08-09]
Beyond Bullet Points came at just the right time for me. I am working on several projects at the moment and was really struggling with getting over the hump as far as engaging the audience. Also, I am working on a collaborative project with someone who is an expert in their field. They were consistently missing the mark with the content they put together. I tried explaining what they needed to do but just didn't seem to be getting my point across (I was missing the mark, too!) I told him to get Beyond Bullet Points so we could work through developing a presentation together. Wow! What a turnaround. Now this expert has a vehicle he can use to unload all of the incredible knowledge he has and do it in a compelling way that engages the audience from the very first minute. We don't have it published yet, but once it is up and running, I would be glad to share it with everyone. Thanks Cliff for putting the pieces of the puzzle together for us. By the way, make sure you visit Cliff's website at beyondbulletpoints.com to get more great tips and ideas that compliment the book.

Death by PowerPoint Syndrome [Posted on 2008-08-25]
When American Idol hit the airwaves, the popular TV show gave false hope to bad singers. When the popular PowerPoint presentation software was introduced by Microsoft, it gave false hope to inexperienced presenters--and turned uninspiring meetings into really boring meetings. It was death by PowerPoint.

But there's hope and there's help. Quick! Order this book and delegate all future PowerPoint presentations to ONLY those who have read and mastered the innovative approach in this remarkable book.

This is a MUST title for your resource library. Atkinson says that the first five slides of a PowerPoint presentation are the most important--and that stories and pictures are absolutely critical in every presentation. The book also includes a CD with custom templates for storyboarding, checklists to ensure your presentation is compelling, and a complete eBook.

In "The Printing Bucket" chapter, one of 20 core competencies in my book, Mastering The Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Non-profit, I recommend that you appoint a "printing coordinator" for your company or department. Ditto for someone to mentor your team on PowerPoint presentations.

After you've identified the PowerPoint guru for your team, point them to Garr Reynolds' blog on issues related to professional design and presentation, such as "Where can you find good images?" Plus, you'll appreciate the new insights from his 131-slide summary of the book Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School (Book & DVD). Be sure to read his blog on "Brain Rules for PowerPoint and Keynote Presenters."

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