The problem with most PowerPoint presentations is that they are trying to serve two incompatible roles at once: visual conveyor of key information in support of the speaker, and documentation of what is being said.
It’s this latter role that gets people into trouble, creating multi-column, multi-colored blocks of bullet points in 10-point text, complete with arrows to draw connections between different points (because the connection is unclear). And while people are puzzling those slides out, they aren’t listening to the presenter. At which point, why not just hand out a document that has that info and be done with it?
If you really want to both communicate and include all that info, add the latter to the notes of each slide, and hand out a print-out (or electronic copy) of the deck afterward. It’s okay to want people to have all the detail for later reference, if that’s important.
Using PowerPoint to convey complex visual information in the middle of a verbal presentation is, in nearly all cases, a poor use of either the venue or the tool.
All of this means more work for the presenter: creating polished detailed material alongside simplified material (and the latter, winnowed down to capture the key concepts, is often the more difficult). But if it conveys the information you feel is important to convey more accurately and memorably, it’s probably worth that extra effort.
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In other words, you're doing it wrong.
There's nothing wrong with bullet points. The problem is when you use too many on one slide. When I taught, I used bullet points all the time, but usually only three or four per slide. I don't remember where I learned that rule of thumb now, but it makes sense to me as a consumer and as a producer of slides. One side benefit is that you can make the font big enough that people can read the slides from the back of the room.
The idea of placing the wordy content in Notes responds to the person who says, "Just send me the presentation."
On another topic, the idea that we're already in the post-mobile age and in the A.I. age is intriguing.
+David Newman I think "bullet points" here is more notional than literal. The point is to minimize reading, maximize core message, with the visual aids, not to reproduce what you are planning on saying on a PPT slide.
(In other words, if you stop speaking to say, "I'm not going to just read the slide, go ahead and take a few moments to read through this yourself," you are, as +Linda Tewes put it, "doing it wrong.")
An alternate way of handling some of this that I've also seen is to have the "complicated" slides as an appendix — stuff put in after your "Any questions?" slide, so that if someone really wants to see that table or blob of text, you can call it up, and it's there when you pass on the PPT, but it's not something you hit on unless called to.
To me, bullet points were like points in an outline. I would speak for 2-3 minutes about each one. So I agree if the point is to avoid making for slides into the manuscript of your speech. But then the headline is misleading.
My coworkers often apologize for a slide that is "an eye-chart". These slides have too many words, printed too small to read, and crammed onto the slide with too many colors in an ugly way. Its like they think there is a shortage of slides, and they need to conserve.
To me, the discipline of condensing my slides to a small number of bullet points helped me edit my presentations down to the essential points.
+David Newman And, ultimately, I think that's the point (with a bit of hyperbole in the initial article). If you want to present a white paper in 10 pt. — then hand out a DOC file. If you want visual aids, the KISS principle applies.
There's a third purpose which also ought to be a separate piece. Notes to remind the speaker what to say.
Ironically PowerPoint has all three sections–but nobody uses them.