When should you stop using bullet points? Now

As a general approach to effective PowerPoint presentation design, bullet points are not OK.

Let me give you a bit more back story. I’ve answered a handful of questions on Quora, a crowdsourced Q&A site. Some have been about social media and marketing, but most address presentation questions. Someone recently answered a question that I had once answered, so I get the notification in my email. The question was, “What makes a good PowerPoint presentation?” (Yes, pretty open ended and generic). As I read the latest answer, my fuse finally ran out and I answered:

“Six bullet points per slide. Each bullet point with no more than 6 words.”

Now, let’s get some perspective on this. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, right? The PowerPoint landscape is so bad (though we’ve made great strides in the last five years) that if all those who use PowerPoint followed this guideline, we’d be way better off than we are currently.