Explain Your Thoughts and Ideas with Pictures Instead of Words

The Cure for Bad PowerPoint, Remedy #3

In our last few newsletters, we've been discussing ways to improve PowerPoint presentations, so the audience doesn't consider them "toxic." Today we're going to cover question number three from our Toxic PowerPoint Self Test. (Here is a link to the whole test if you want to see it again.)

3. Are you explaining your thoughts and ideas with words instead of pictures?
   Do you ask yourself on each slide, is there a visual that can replace or accompany the text on this slide? If not, your presentation is most likely too heavy on text and too light on pictures.

Once you've nailed down the content of your presentation, the time is right to go back through it slide-by-slide to see where visuals can tell the story as well, if not better, than text. The rule we follow is at least half (50 percent!) OR MORE of your slides should include a picture, image or graphic . This does not include clip art!

If you're thinking, "that sounds nice, but where do I get these images?" Here are some links to free or low cost sites to help you with that:

Free
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/clipart/default.aspx (be sure when you do a search that you search for photos so you aren’t tempted to use the clip art that’s available here)
http://www.burningwell.org/gallery2/main.php

Low Cost
http://unlimited.photostogo.com
http://www.bigstockphoto.com
http://www.stockxpert.com/

Now that you have some ideas on where to find images, here are some ideas on what to do with them:

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