Strategies for Presentations: Recommendation for Bullet Points

00:00 How many bullet points should you put on each PowerPoint slide? It's a frequent question, and there are a lot of people who have very specific ironclad rules, three or five.

00:13 I think you're missing the point when asking that question.

00:16 The real question should be, what ideas do you have, and how can you communicate it more effectively to your audience? How can you make your ideas more understandable and more memorable? In all of my research and testing audiences all over the world, bullet points with text on PowerPoint slides that you project while speaking are completely ineffective.

00:37 So it frankly doesn't really matter.

00:40 Now, if you're emailing people a PowerPoint or giving it as a handout later, fine. Put as many bullet points up as you want because people can read at their own speed. If it's interesting, they can reread it, they can highlight it, they can file it away, reference it again.

00:57 But when you are speaking, and you're standing up in front of people, and you're pointing to a whole bunch of text and bullet points behind you, you're asking people to read while you're talking to them, while you're distracting them.

01:12 That's not how people like to read in real life.

01:14 So I would recommend not actually using bullet points in the PowerPoint that you project.

01:21 Fine to use them for the PowerPoint that you're emailing or handing out to people.

01:26 And if you are going to use bullet points and I can't dissuade you from that, then I would simply say the fewer bullet points per page, the better off you are.