Last week I wrote a post recommending you use images instead of bullet points in your presentations. That’s the best thing to do but it can take quite a while to find images and make the changes.
A quicker fix that will avoid slides with lots of bullet points is to spread them out.
What you need to do first is put each text item onto its own slide. This allows it to be in a larger font.
Next, try to reduce the number of words to as few as possible. As a rule of thumb, try to have six words or fewer.
There’s now a lot of space on each slide and maybe you can add something to enhance the text. It could be an image of some sort but if you’re in a hurry you could leave it as text on slides. Or perhaps you can use colours to liven things up, changing either the slide background colour or the text colour.
I know this will mean there are many more slides in your presentation but these days everything is digital rather than hard copy and the extra pixels are (virtually) free.
This approach is not as good as using images but it shares the main benefit: you’re taking away the invitation for the audience to read the full list of bullet points whilst you are talking about the first item. By keeping the text back until you need it will keep the audience focused on you (i.e. listening to what you are saying) and more likely to remember your message.