Hacking PowerPoint

All the animations in this article were done using PowerPoint.

Whenever you’re presenting an idea, the return on your effort is maximized when people can fully understand it. While speaking about an idea is a good start, PowerPoint is a tool that gives you an opportunity to visualize it to your listeners also, giving them a much more complete understanding of your point.

I recently taught a workshop on hacking PowerPoint to effectively engage audiences at MIT’s business school, Sloan. The challenge was to rework the audience’s way of thinking about PowerPoint to transform them into more effective presenters. With the overwhelmingly positive feedback and subsequent adoption of many of my suggested techniques, I decided to write this article provide some tips for a wider audience.

I won’t get into the instructions for creating all the different slides, because it’s much more intuitive through an interactive workshop (if you’re interested in a workshop, please email me at kenny@kennyl.com). This article goes more into the thought process behind effective and unorthodox PowerPoint presentations, along with some examples that apply those thoughts.