I’m working today on a presentation I’ll be giving at work this coming Wednesday. I’ve spent a good chunk of the day on it so far, but I haven’t opened PowerPoint yet, and I believe my presentation will be all the better for it.
So many PowerPoint presentations I have seen all seem the same to me, and I’d be willing to bet that the presenters created their presentations by opening a blank PowerPoint template (or Keynote, Impress etc.), and started plunking in bullet points. Without realizing it, they surrendered themselves to the typical PowerPoint mode of thinking, and structuring of information.
I believe a better approach is to use your presentation software last. Today, I’ve used three tools: Evernote for information collection, Xmind (a free mind mapping tool) for high level structure/framework of my presentation, and Omni Outliner Pro (an outlining tool) for the lower level structure and presentation notes, and I’ve been able to focus on content and organization, rather than getting sidetracked by formatting bullet points and font sizes.
When I am done preparing my content (and not a second before), then I can open PowerPoint and start creating slides, slides that are organized around the content (as opposed to content being shoehorned into slides)
I think presentation software should be treated as PDF generation software, i.e. as a renderer of finished content. The Adobe Acrobat format was not designed for editing, and similarly Presentation software should not be used as idea generation software.
