Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft® PowerPoint® to Create Presentations that Inform, Motivate, and Inspire (Business Skills)

by Cliff Atkinson

As described earlier, writing your slide headlines using the Act II columns has now given your presentation an important scalability that will play out when you work in PowerPoint. When you create a presentation with three columns, you are prioritizing your ideas in order of importance, from left to right. If you have a 45-minute presentation, you’ll present all your slides in Act II. If your time is unexpectedly cut to 15 minutes, you’ll skip the Detail slides, and if your time is cut to 5 minutes, you’ll also skip the Explanation slides. Because you have applied the power of a hierarchy to prioritize your ideas, you scale up or down to the level of information appropriate to the time you have, without sacrificing the integrity or the clarity of your thinking at any level.