Customer Rating:  
Summary: 200 pages of fluff
Comment: This book is awful. It promises to show you how to create powerpoint presentations that motivate and inspire. But instead, it gives you a couple of pages teaching you the author's format (basically, a Hollywood script, in 3 Acts) then spends the rest of the book telling you how to create hidden slides, how to insert clip-art, and tons of "filler" pages of "top 10 things to remember" that are, frankly, common sense.
The Hollywood format, does look somewhat useful for creating a dialog with your audience and the supporting slides for that conversation. But it seems the author had about 20 pages of content, but needed to create another 180 pages so he could sell a book. And in that 180 pages he fails to discuss important topics like how to summarize ideas crisply on a slide, and instead pushes all the content into the notes section, and uses the slide as a place to put clip art of a sailboat, or something equally pointless. All the content in the notes section? Why not just use a Word document then?
I returned this book to Barnes & Noble, disgusted by the shallow treatment of an important topic. I almost never return books, but this so completely failed to fulfill the book's promise that I felt swindled.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Best yet from Cliff Atkinson... I'm now a complete fan!
Comment: I recommend "Beyond Bullet Points" in my class all the time. I continually have people coming up to me and asking where my slides came from or how I go about creating them. While I cannot say that I stick to the BBP process strictly, I do use its concepts heavily in my slides. This is why I tell these people ot start with BBP.
Well, I just picked up my copy of the 2007 version of BBP last week and wow! This is what it should have always been. It was good before, but the difference between the original BBP and the 2007 versions is as big as the difference between PowerPoint 2003 and PowerPoint 2007. Cliff has provided much more in the way of research-based findings that support the BBP methodology. He has also, I feel, done a much better job of explaining the whole process.
If you are totally new to BBP, you will understand the process and the reason it works much better with this new version that those of us who are old timers now. If you've used the first book or were even turned off by the first book, I highly recommend taking a look at this one. I don't believe you'll regret it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Genuinely novel and helpful tips? Brilliant!
Comment: I'm a real cynic about books like this, since they tend to be 99% fluff and 1% practical advice. I was very pleasantly surprised by Beyond Bullet Points. It outlines a great way of presenting, and it does so very clearly. I especially appreciated that it brings in sound educational and psychological research to show why things should be done a certain way, such as the discussion on how typical presentations lead to interference on the audio channel of human information processing. (Don't worry - the language is completely non-technical in this book!)
Getting this book and using the technique in it will make you a very impressive presenter, and spare your audience the soul-crushing boredom that usually results from PowerPoint presentations. Be warned that it isn't "easy" - the technique prompts you to think about your presentation more than you may be used to. Nothing good is completely easy!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great practical advice
Comment: This is not a blow by blow of the bells and whistles of the program. The book gives a clear presentation which re-thinks the purpose of the program: conveying information effectively. Forget what the company put into the program; use the program more effectively in presentation. Tell your story.
Customer Rating:
Summary: beyond bullet points
Comment: I have found the book a useful tool for the developmental stage. So far, good, however, when it arrived the box was opened at the bottom, due to a lack of tape. I was lucky it ALL arrived as one.
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