Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Very good book
Comment: This book goes beyond the nuts and bolts of putting together a great PowerPoint presentation. It goes deep into the psychology of human attention and our ability to comprehend new material. If you want to persuade, inform, or teach a group of folks, this book will really help.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Love the new approach
Comment: Great philosophy! I hate when people read me things off of power points, it makes it seem like such a waste of time. This book fixes that in plain language and step by step directions. Sometimes I think they belabor some points, but it may be necessary to ride our minds of old ways of thinking.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Death by PowerPoint Syndrome
Comment: When American Idol hit the airwaves, the popular TV show gave false hope to bad singers. When the popular PowerPoint presentation software was introduced by Microsoft, it gave false hope to inexperienced presenters--and turned uninspiring meetings into really boring meetings. It was death by PowerPoint.
But there's hope and there's help. Quick! Order this book and delegate all future PowerPoint presentations to ONLY those who have read and mastered the innovative approach in this remarkable book.
This is a MUST title for your resource library. Atkinson says that the first five slides of a PowerPoint presentation are the most important--and that stories and pictures are absolutely critical in every presentation. The book also includes a CD with custom templates for storyboarding, checklists to ensure your presentation is compelling, and a complete eBook.
In "The Printing Bucket" chapter, one of 20 core competencies in my book, Mastering The Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Non-profit, I recommend that you appoint a "printing coordinator" for your company or department. Ditto for someone to mentor your team on PowerPoint presentations.
After you've identified the PowerPoint guru for your team, point them to Garr Reynolds' blog on issues related to professional design and presentation, such as "Where can you find good images?" Plus, you'll appreciate the new insights from his 131-slide summary of the book Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School (Book & DVD). Be sure to read his blog on "Brain Rules for PowerPoint and Keynote Presenters."
Customer Rating:
Summary: Just what I needed to get energized again!
Comment: Beyond Bullet Points came at just the right time for me. I am working on several projects at the moment and was really struggling with getting over the hump as far as engaging the audience. Also, I am working on a collaborative project with someone who is an expert in their field. They were consistently missing the mark with the content they put together. I tried explaining what they needed to do but just didn't seem to be getting my point across (I was missing the mark, too!) I told him to get Beyond Bullet Points so we could work through developing a presentation together. Wow! What a turnaround. Now this expert has a vehicle he can use to unload all of the incredible knowledge he has and do it in a compelling way that engages the audience from the very first minute. We don't have it published yet, but once it is up and running, I would be glad to share it with everyone. Thanks Cliff for putting the pieces of the puzzle together for us. By the way, make sure you visit Cliff's website at beyondbulletpoints.com to get more great tips and ideas that compliment the book.
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.
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