Ep 194 How Many Bullet Points Should You Put on a PowerPoint Slide July 12, 2016

How many bullet points should your PowerPoint presentation have per page?

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public, to the media, at work and in life Speaking with TJ Walker.

So this is a question I do receive from time to time from clients. It's a question you see splashed across the Internet in a lot of books. Everyone has a slightly different take on it. Some people say the magic number is three. Others say, well, it could be 10 if you limit each bullet point to three words or less. I have a different way of thinking about it, and I want to answer this question directly, but I want you to come up with something usable. Let's step back a minute. Before you think of your job of creating a slide and bullet points, ask yourself, what are you really trying to do with this presentation? What do you want the audience to do? What is the one thing you want them to do? Always start by asking yourself that. Then ask yourself, what are the ideas, messages, numbers, facts that are going to motivate your audience to do what you want them to do next? Ask yourself, how can you make those messages, those ideas, remembered by your audience? Because if they can't remember them, how is that going to motivate them to do anything? Then, and only then do I want you to think about all your tools available to make these ideas. Remember. Now, one of the tools is to explain it. Another one is to tell a story. Another one is to use some form of a slide that you project or that you hand out or email. I'll talk about those differences in just a moment.

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Okay, I'll tell you what I tell my clients who pay me a lot of money for this advice. I'll tell it to you for free and you might not like it. Those of you who are PowerPoint creators might not like this answer, but my answer to the question of how many bullet points would you put on a PowerPoint slide is zero. Now, why do I say that? It's because I simply do not have any evidence that putting a bullet point with text after it is an effective way to get audiences to remember that idea. You can say, well, tj, that's how it's always done. That's how we do it in our corporation. That's how it's done. I understand it's done that way, but I test audiences all over the world and I find audiences regardless of their education, industry expectations, skill level, don't remember bullet points with Text doesn't matter if you have a hundred bullet points or three bullet points or one bullet point. Doesn't matter if you have a full sentence or three words or one word. It's simply not a very effective tool for increasing people's retention. So that's why I'm not a fan of using bullet points. If I'm writing a memo, bullet points are perfectly fine. I've got nothing wrong against the bullet point. It breaks things up for the eye if you're reading. But giving a presentation isn't primarily a reading experience for most people. They're sitting there listening to you talk, trying to figure out what. What do I really need to know here? So that's my problem with having any bullet points. All things being equal, is it better to have three bullet points versus 14 bullet points on a page? I guess. But that's like saying, all things being equal, are you better off hitting your head with a hammer three times or ten times? Yeah, but if it's up to you, why would you hit your head with a hammer at all? When you're starting off to do something and you have control over it, why go into it with the idea of trying to do the least bad thing possible? Why not start off actually trying to succeed? So here's the test I have for you with any kind of slide. Whether you have three bullet points, 10 bullet points, or 20 bullet points, give your presentation to one or two colleagues who are similar in mindset to the audience you'll be speaking to. Not someone who's intimately aware of everything you do. Not someone who created the slides or the presentation, but someone who knows less than you do, whose knowledge base is going to be similar to the audience that give them your PowerPoint presentation. When you're done, ask them every slide they remember. Ask them every bullet point they remember if they remember the bullet point. Okay, you have evidence it works, use it. If they don't remember your bullet point well, you now have evidence that it didn't work. Throw it in the trash can. Why go into a presentation knowing something doesn't work if your audience can't remember it. It didn't work. Now, I mentioned earlier before the break that there's two types of PowerPoint presentations. There's what you project on a screen in front of people in a room. But there's also the slide deck that you might email to people in advance or you might print out. And those of you who've heard me pontificate on this subject before, no, I do stress you can have two completely different presentations. If you're emailing it to someone, put lots and lots of text, put lots of graphs, put lots of complexity. If they want to read it, they will. If they don't want to read it, they don't have to. So you've heard my philosophy of how many bullet points to put on a slide, a PowerPoint slide. When it comes to what you're projecting, the correct answer, I believe is zero. If someone else is forcing you to put bullet points, then the biggest rule of thumb is the fewer bullet points the better. When it comes to the PowerPoint that you are emailing to people or handing out, it is different because people can read in quiet, not have to listen to you talk, they can focus on it more. In that case, it begs the question, why are you using a PowerPoint program? There's nothing wrong with good old fashioned Microsoft Word if you're using a PC or the equivalent with Apple. And I should know that I just bought another Apple computer. Use a word processing document. If people are staring at it on a computer screen. This idea that you can just put a few words on the screen and someone's staring at it from their own computer and having to hit down and space through 189 slides, I don't think there's any evidence that that works. If you have a lot of data, facts, numbers, put it in a Word document or a basic document. Let people read it the way they've been used to reading their whole life. You, you want to read a great novel or a great work of nonfiction. You don't ask that the publisher put it in gigantic font and bullet point it out and have eight words per slide, it becomes per page. It's tedious to read that way. So the rule of thumb is use every medium for its maximum impact and ultimate ease of use for the end user. In this case, if you're emailing it to someone or printing it out, it's for someone who is reading. If you are giving a speech and projecting it, it's for people who are in the audience of a speaker. You guess what? That is not how people like to read. People like to read. They like for you and me to shut up. For there to be relative quiet in a room where they can focus on just that one thing. So that is a long answer, but that's what we do here. Sorry if you think it's too long, but we go really in depth to your questions on any aspect of public speaking, presentation skills, speaking to the media, speaking in times of crisis. If you have any questions about these. Send it to me and I will answer you with with as much depth and scope as possible. To help you, you can always send your message, your questions, your topics to me. Tjediatrainingworldwide.com for that matter, you can call leave a voicemail 212 that's US country code 1212-764-4955 I'm TJ Walker. As always, may all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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