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become Standard Operating Procedure in business today, as ingrained as a religious ritual. In fact, the document function of PowerPoint has snowballed into multiple subsets, including send-aheads, leave-behinds, and speaker notes. The practice persists because, in the pressured world of business, multitasking and repurposing are equated with efficiency. But these shortcuts disrupt and trivialize the presentation as Mr. Tufte correctly observes. The extra information in presentations gives both presenter and audience too much to process, and in documents, gives the reader too little to process. A PowerPoint deck does not stand alone, and no decision maker will make a decision based on a slide show alone.

The correct role model for graphics exists 24/7 in television news programs. Anderson Cooper of CNN, Katie Couric of CBS, and Brian Williams of NBC provide the details for the stories they tell; the graphics that accompany them are simply illustrative headlines. Professional broadcasting organizations have sophisticated graphical capabilities far beyond those of PowerPoint, yet the images they show are there only as support for the newscaster.

For your presentation graphics, follow the correctly balanced role model you see on all those television news broadcasts. The newscasters tell the story, while the professional graphics that flit by over their shoulders are simply headlines. Emulate Anderson Cooper, Katie Couric, and Brian Williams when you present. Make your slides the headlines, while you provide the details. In the Show and Tell of Presentations, PowerPoint is for the show; you do the telling.

Consider bullets as headlines and your discussion as the body text. Consider numeric charts as trends and your narrative as an interpretation of the trends. Consider illustrations as talking points; you add illuminating examples. All the narrative flow and added value must come from you.

For the sake of your audiences, focus on the penmanship, not the pen.

27. You Can’t Use a Sentence As a Prompt!: Less Verbiage Is More Useful

A senior engineering manager at a large telecommunications equipment company was one of the participants in a Power Presentations program. True to her technical nature, she wanted to be as accurate in her presentation as in her work, so when she headed up to the front of the room to deliver the pitch she had prepared, she brought along her laptop, with her slides as speaker notes. Having diligently practiced, she started her pitch smoothly, but about a minute into it, she lost track of her content, a fate that befalls many people in front of live audiences. Her eyes darted down to the laptop for a cue, and she suddenly froze. A horrified look came across her face and she blurted, “You can’t use a sentence as a prompt!”

In that one moment, she understood the importance of the difference between a presentation and a document. When her eyes moved down to the slide, she saw a full sentence with all the necessary parts of speech: articles, conjunctions, prepositions, and helping verbs. That construct would have been necessary in a document, which must be free-standing and independent of the presenter.

But in a presentation, in which the presenter is the focus and the slides function only as support or illustration, bullets must be treated as headlines, containing only key words: nouns, verbs, and modifiers. Had the engineer followed that simple notion, she would have seen only a few words in her glance, more than enough to serve as a prompt. When she realized that a sentence, with all its detailed parts, is a hindrance rather than a help, she became an instant convert to the headline approach.

Are you ready to convert?

28. Baiting the Salesperson: Selling Is about In-Person Communication

In the pressured world of business, multitasking and repurposing are equated with efficiency. These practices result in the inefficient use of Microsoft PowerPoint for both presentations and documents, with multiple variations of the latter: leave-behinds, speaker notes, uniformity of corporate messaging,