Nancy Duarte and her firm Duarte Design have just released Slidedocs, their latest presentation book.

Continuing their trend of releasing books for free and in multimedia formats (see resonate), this latest is available for free download at their site in PowerPoint format. Though it seems odd to release a book as a PowerPoint file, in this case it is entirely appropriate as the entire focus of the book is creating print documents using PowerPoint, something Nancy calls "Slidedocs."

Practical Business Solutions

I have known that Slidedocs has been in the works for a while, and I'm excited for its release as it addresses an uncomfortable truth about corporate environments that often goes unaddressed by many presentation experts: PowerPoint is used far more than just as a tool to create formal on-screen slideshows. I'm not talking about the amateur poster designs at the water cooler announcing a canned food drive (although that's certainly a valid use), but rather high-stakes reports, memos, strategy documents, proposals and even white papers—things that once were the domain of Microsoft Word.

But Microsoft Word has become an entirely unusable program for most (myself included) if one wishes to inject any degree of design or complexity. This fact, coupled with the need for all types of communications to be more concise, produced more quickly and delivered more visually, has made PPT the default and de facto method of business communication creation.

We can debate whether this is a good thing or not, but it's a fact. Unfortunately, PPT's intrinsic design as "slideware," leads most to create stereotypical on-screen slides even when their work will never see a projector or large LCD screen. (Microsoft's default pages don't help, pushing its users to make 44pt headers and 32pt body copy).

The trend toward using PPT to create print documents was something I started seeing years ago, and instead of fighting it, I have long advocated using PPT in 3 distinct formats:

Time was that I used to read every presentation book that came out. While I still have quite a full bookshelf on volumes dedicated to slides, I don't always immediately rush to pick up every new book published on the subject.

But when I saw a new book called How to Design TED Worthy Presentation Slides, I was intrigued. Partly this was because this seemed to be the latest in a line of books from a rather prolific author I hadn't heard of: Akash Karia. Akash is a professional speaker and coach, and his books have titles such as Public Speaking Mastery and How to Deliver a Great TED Talk.

Akash has mined dozens of TED talks for best practices and examples of what works best in the world of TED. (I was happy to see him make many references to one of my favorite well-designed TED Talks, Bill Gates's Innovating to Zero.) There is nothing truly revolutionary here, and all of it has been noted and said many times before. Still, TED is the one place today where we can see a wide spectrum of presentations in similar formats, so the topic makes for very good material.

If you have read Garr Reynolds, Nancy Duarte and similar authors, it won't surprise you to learn that...

• The best backgrounds are the simplest ones
• The rule of thirds works
• One should stick to one or two fonts only
• The less text, the better
• One message per slide is key

For me though, there was one lesson that while obvious serves as a nice guiding rule for all presentations. Akash urges readers to consider a single question when creating slides:

Am I including this slide to help my audience or to help myself?