On the topic of bullets, the advice is pretty simple: Don’t Use Bullets. Bullets are a crutch in PowerPoint – they are always there in the standard templates, and when you start adding text, shazam! there they are. And once you’ve got them in the slide, they usually don’t get removed. To summarize: bullets are one of the easiest ways to create “yet another awful PowerPoint”.

Not convinced? Let’s think about a few things…

1) People can read text faster than they can speak the same words.

The effect of this is that if you show a slide with 6 points on it, the audience has read all of them before you’ve finished explaining your first point. And, while they were reading, they were not listening to what you are saying. They disconnected. Once they disconnect, it takes some effort for them to re-connect to what you are saying, and re-orient themselves in the flow of the presentation. If your slide deck is all bullets, this disconnect / re-connect loop gets very tiring, and people check-out, check their BlackBerry’s, fire off a few tweets or just fall asleep. When that happens, you are simply wasting your time and theirs.

2) Bullets are the “discount” summary of what you are going to say.

In addition to the fact that the audience gets ahead of you, and gets disconnected, they are also only getting part of the story. Ideas are usually much more expansive than what can be crammed into 7 words in 30 point font with a bullet in front. The bullet is the “discount” version of your idea. Since every presentation is about marketing (yourself, your idea, your product, your slide-technique, your tie) you want the audience to get the full story about why you think your thing/service/design/tie is great, and why they should too. (Note: If you don’t really believe in what you are talking about, don’t present it. More on this in another post.)

So – hopefully that’s got you thinking outside the bullet box. But what if you actually need to show a list?

One option is to show a REAL list…

I’ve re-used this image in a number of slide decks, just changing the text to fit the scenario.

Another option is to use a series of images. Maybe the original slide looks like this…

It could be changed into a rapid-fire series of images…

which has a lot more impact to the users, and keeps them engaged.

I looked through well one of our “Agile 101″ decks that has more than 350 slides explaining the both the zen and process of implementing Agile practices, and this was as close to a “bullet list” as I got:

The first slide gives the visual that we are talking about a meeting, and the second lists the key things we address at a “Sprint Planning” meeting. Sure it’s a list, but no bullets were involved and given the other 349 non-listish slides, no audience members fell asleep.

Bottom line:

You can usually avoid bullets, and if you want to keep the audience engaged, you should.