Great PowerPoint Examples: Get Inspired!

I recently took a colleague completely off-guard. The meeting was about to begin. He was apologizing that a projector and screen weren’t set up. And for some reason, I was very calm. “I told the hotel staff that I didn’t need any of that stuff. I don’t have any slides,” I told him.

He thought about my comment for several moments. “You’re not going to use slides?!”

To my co-worker, it was unfathomable that in this day and age someone would not want to use PowerPoint to supplement his presentation. PowerPoint (or Keynote for those Mac users) is a great tool that has just been overused, and often abused, in presentations.

In the event that PowerPoint is something you’re planning to use in an upcoming presentation, and in the event there’s nothing I can do to talk you out of using it, then at least click on a couple of the following links. These great PowerPoint examples offer a glimpse of what can be possible when it comes to creating some amazing visual aids using PowerPoint…

Great PowerPoint Example #1: You Suck At PowerPoint

I like this presentation because, if we all take a good, hard, honest look in the mirror, this is the truth. The designer of this presentation (who also designed a similar, more gently-named presentation called Steal This Presentation) offers a series of common mistakes we make in designing PowerPoint and how to address them.

Great PowerPoint Example #2: Introduction to Slide Design

Alex Rister, who has a pretty amazing blog entitled Creating Communication, also designs some amazing presentations. The Introduction to Slide Design presentation has a dual-purpose: 1) explaining how to put together great presentations and 2) showing you what great slides look like.

Not So Great Example #3: The Gettysburg Address

At the beginning of this post, I claimed PowerPoint is over-used, often abused. I mean it. PowerPoint isn’t always necessary. And Peter Norvig does an amazing job illustrating this. How historic would Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address have been had he chosen to use PowerPoint?

Looking for some additional tips on how to create your own great PowerPoint presentation? You may find these other blog posts helpful:

Survey Says! Creating Training Games Like Family Feud With PowerPoint
Trick Out My PowerPoint (co-written with Phase(Two)Learning’s Michelle Baker)
Flowchart: Is Your PowerPoint Any Good?

Have your own great PowerPoint examples? Share them in the comments. We’d love to hear about what others are doing!

Brian Washburn

Brian has over 25 years of experience in Learning & Development including the last 7 as CEO of Endurance Learning.

Brian is always available to chat about learning & development and to talk about whether Endurance Learning can be your training team’s “extra set of hands”.

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