How to Kick-Out Bullet Points from Presentation?

Have you ever dreamt of designing a presentation that wins your audience’s attention? Want to get appreciated for the work done? Then you are referring to the right article. Eliminating traditional ways of briefing points can make a presentation catchier. Stamping out bullet points from the presentation can be more challenging and efficacious as bullet points make your lists content-heavy, and your audience struggles to pay attention to your list, agree with your lists, and to recall your lists.

How-to-avoid-using-bullet-points

What is Death by PowerPoint?

Death by PowerPoint is caused by poor use of presentation software. In recent times where there is a presentation, there is presentation software with it. Being a business professional, I am very sure you might have witnessed a one. That type of presentation never seems to end. The audience seems to remain distracted from the presentation topic and with the context that has been presented. The crucial contributors to death by PowerPoint include unattractive graphics, text-heavy slides, bullet points, etc.

The death by PowerPoint is blamed mainly on the use of bullet points in the presentation. It’s somehow sad as bullet points are not inherently bad. It can be useful for writing documents. However, not a great tool for crafting presentations and stops making your presentation effective. Your content highlighted using bulleted points tends to engage less, convince less, recall less. From some of the enthralling business PowerPoint templates from your next presentation here.

How to Avoid Using Bullet Points?

Being an audience, have you ever struggled to keep pace with presentation slides packed with bullet points while trying to grasp what the speaker is saying? At the end of the presentation, do you remember anything? For many presenters, bullet points are on-to-go choice to break up text-heavy information. But it isn’t so important from the audience to perceive. For most bullet points have become the cliché of trial graphics. There is not a good reason to use it, instead of enormous to not use it. Bullet points or numbered lists aren’t aesthetically bothersome. Bullet points or numbered lists can have negative impacts on your presentation. It’s a fact that information conveyed using visuals aids can be remembered even weeks after presentation.

If you have ever seen Google CEO Sundar Pichai presentation, then you might have noticed that in presentations bullet points, text-heavy slides are increasingly avoided. You will find a large amount of white space on each slide. Even Pichai didn’t clutter his presentation with extraneous texts and numbers. Even Google employees are trained to create brain-friendly presentations with fresher style, less text-heavy, and more visually appealing.

Why Avoid Bullet Points and Text Heavy Presentation? 

According to a study by Cognitive scientist, it is revealed that the brain can’t perform multi-tasking. The brain can’t do two things same time and moreover equally well. In the presentation, we can’t read text on slides while listening to the speaker and retaining all crucial details.  

Tips to Kick-Out Bullet Points  

• Minimize Your Listings:  Firstly, identify the items in your listings and then reduce to most important ones.
• Create New Slide for Each Item: Once you have sorted your list, now it’s time to design slides for each of your lists. If your item is worth mentioning, which needs to be spotlighted, remember to design highly-visual slides with minimal text.
• If Slides Can’t Be Designed for Each item, Present It with Highly Visual List: If you can’t design slides for each item, then be innovative with you with layouts. Never use the default bullet point or numbered list; instead, you should be creative and use featured visuals that interact with your audience.   
• Highlight: If you are compelled to use executive PowerPoint designs which use bullets. Then you can feature the most crucial details with bullet points. Highlight keywords or key phrases of each sentence using bold text. Use spacing to give some air between paragraphs or bullets to separate them easily.
•  Iconify:  Icons are great visuals and can be tricky at the same time. They are great visuals to be added with a lot of text. Unlike images, icons can fit in small spaces. The icon reflects the exact message which audience can easily interpret with a simple text label.
• Chunking: As you have done overemphasizing in a paragraph, likewise, you can chunk your bullet points or numbered lists into shapes, which makes your context more pleasing for your audience. Use shapes, tables to separate your information and add icons, numbers to show a pattern or to distinguish each chunk.
• Tabify: Instead of using bullet points or numbered lists, tabify your context, which means divide your text into more clear parts using tables. A table has rows and columns. Even you can use contrasting lines to make cells of the table look more appealing.
• Callouts and Quotes: One of the sterling ways to eliminate the use of bullet points is using callouts and quotes. Simply add images of a person or icon for a person with speech bubbles or callouts with texts inside.
• Using SmartArt:  SmartArt is the most convenient and quickest way to design visuals in a presentation. Often using SmartArt can be tricky and should be used with caution. Smart Art automatically adjusts your text and graphics; you lose control over the formatting of the slide and end up being messier.
• Pause, Pause, and Pause: Till now, you might have mastered design tactics to eliminate bullet points. Here is a speaking skill which will aid to kick out bullet points from the presentation. As bullet points give time to the audience to digest the information, pausing over again during your presentation lets the audience to mull over what they hear. Let your audience think over the topic they heard and then move on to the next topic.

Bullet points aren’t so inherently bad. But overuse makes your presentation boring and unattractive. To kick out, bullet points get updated with new presentation ideas