TJ Walker gives concise, practical advice for using PowerPoint effectively: avoid text-heavy slides and bullet points, use one image and one idea per slide, and prefer handouts or documents for detailed text. He emphasizes that slides should make a point clear within two seconds and improve understanding and recall; otherwise they should be discarded or used as handouts.
Okay, you're giving a presentation and someone or you decide you want to use PowerPoint, that's okay. A lot of people think, oh, PowerPoint, that's the worst thing ever. It's so hard. Death by PowerPoint. Yeah, there is a lot of bad PowerPoint out there, but PowerPoint can be effective. I use PowerPoint, some of my best friends are PowerPoint. But let me give you a few tips to save you a massive amount of time and make you much more effective as a speaker. What you're going to see when people in their presentations use PowerPoint. Typically, a lot of bullet points, a lot of text, a lot of complexity, wildly complex graphs with 27 different colors of lines and your eyes kind of glaze over and maybe you're left with some impression that the person is smart or hard working or something. But in general it's not effective. So rather than us spend 5 or 10 or 50 hours on creating the traditional PowerPoint slides with massive amounts of complexity. I want to make your life easy and you're a beginner. There's no sense learning all the time consuming bad habits other people have. Why don't we just skip right to the good habits? Here are the things that actually work with PowerPoint. Based on my own testing of audiences that I work with from six continents and what I found works remarkably consistently all over the world. You want to communicate with PowerPoint slides or any sort of images. The rule of thumb really comes down to this one idea per slide. Use images, not text. You do that, you're going to solve pretty much all the problems people have with PowerPoint. And you're going to give the most effective PowerPoint presentation of anyone in your organization. Oh, but DJ, don't I have to have five bullet points versus three bullet points? Is it 10 words or seven words per sentence? You didn't listen to me. What I'm telling you, the most effective way to use a PowerPoint presentation is put up one image per slide, one idea per slide. If it's an image, it's not text. If you want to give people a lot of text, my advice, Handouts, PDF, give them a book, give them an email. Someone comes to me and they want to know about speech on media training. I'll just hand them a book. But I'm not going to project bullet points. The points from this book, if I am giving a presentation. So it all comes down to that. One idea per slide. It doesn't matter how many bullet points. Don't use bullet points. There's no evidence they work don't have a bunch of words or any words on a slide. Images that make the idea come alive. Here's the test for a PowerPoint slide. Can someone look at it, understand the point in two seconds or less and remember the point? If it helps your audience understand your message and remember your message more than you just saying it, well, then use the slide. If it doesn't do both of those things, throw the slide in the trash can or give it as a handout.
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