Several recent articles have discussed some PowerPoint Best Practices to help you avoid inflicting ‘Death by PowerPoint’ on your audiences. You may have even added a few new or different tools to your Presenter Tool Kit as a result. Here’s another one.
Yes … a picture is worth a thousand words – or, in the case of PowerPoint – a thousand bullet points. And a great picture is worth even more. We humans are visual learners. Much of what is stored in our long-term memory got in there through visual stimulus. Of the three levels of communication – words, tone of voice and visual – the most effective and memorable is the visual – your slides, if you use them properly. Ironically, the least effective slides have only words, yet most presentations include slide after slide of bullet points. Pictures and charts are more effective, but used much less. Go figure.