Kathy Sierra has written a great piece that puts forward that
“Sometimes the best presentation is… no presentation.”
She calls for people to ditch PowerPoint where it is not truly needed. Furthermore if it is needed make every slide fight for its right to be in the slide deck.
Here here Kathy! I couldn’t agree more.
James Kendrick of jkOnTheRun points out that if you tend to make lots of presentations and you are a tablet user you should have a look at MindManager. I agree but with three provisos.
Firstly MindManager is a powerful application on desktops and laptops as well – so this tip is not limited to TabletPC users. (Although the TabletPC integration built into MindManager is fantastic – so if you use MindManager lots you should look at the TabletPC platform.)
Secondly, if you are going to try to use MindManager for presentations then you should take the time to learn the mindd mapping techniques properly. It is entirely possible to restructure bullet points into a mind map, trading one structure for another. This will add nothing to the presentation.
Lastly, if you can, avoid “presenting” all together. I prefer to run interactive workshops where I can. To do this you need to limit the number of attendees to about 10 at the most but if you can pull it off it will be much more productive. Building a mind map in advance using MindManager will give you a rough framework to work. As you work through it you can annotate it or expand it as the discussion warrants. At the end of the meeting you can send it to the attendees as an image or export it to any one of several applications.