I’ve never seen anybody excited to see a PowerPoint presentation but I have seen many people excited about creating them. What’s wrong with the latter group? I don’t know, but the bullet point fetish is more common than you’d expect.
I’m a designer, and I’ve seen it all when it comes to bulleted lists.
I’ve seen:
Lists of unrelated bullet points
Lists of related bullet points but the relation was clear only to the author
Numbered lists that should have been bulleted lists
Bulleted lists that should have been numbered lists
Lists with half a dozen levels of indentation
Multicor bullets
Multi-paragraphs bullets
5pt text multi-paragraphs bullets because they wouldn’t fit on the slide otherwise
Bullets bleeding out of the slide frame
Bullets so concise even their author couldn't make sense of them
Lists spanning multiple columns, pages, or slides
Lists so long you forgot what the list was about by the time you got to the end of it
How can I still be alive after having endured all this?
Check out The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint which explains how bulleted lists (and presentations in general) make you dumb and confuse your audience. Share it with you know who, let’s make this a better world.
