JULY 27, 2015
When writing business documents (aside from emails), most people turn to word-processing software. That’s not the only option. You can do everything — outlines, drafts, revisions, and even layouts, if you’d like — in PowerPoint or similar presentation programs.
That’s what I’ve used to write my books, internal documents, sales collateral, and web copy, for several reasons:
I can brainstorm with abandon. Because PowerPoint is so modular, it allows me to block out major themes (potential sections or chapters) and quickly see if I can generate ample ideas to support them. In early stages, each slide resembles a Pinterest board, with a simple but descriptive title, some rough text, and a few sketched or found images that clarify the concepts. If I can’t produce enough insights for a particular theme, I abandon it before spending too much time crafting language. It’s easy to drag individual slides to the end of the deck, in case I’d like to revisit them later, or just delete them.
Below you can see an excerpt from the PowerPoint draft of my second book, Resonate. Every slide represents a two-page spread. The content is much denser than it would be on a typical slide, but that’s okay because it’s meant to be printed, not projected. And anyway, it’s a work in progress.
This was the idea-generation phase. In addition to the rough text and the bevy of images for inspiration, I included citations and links (in green) at the bottom of each page (the gray area) so I could have ready access to my research.
Here’ one spread, before and after the designer got ahold of it:
I can arrange and rearrange. It’s a struggle for me to begin drafting prose until I’m confident that the structure is sound. Working in slides, as opposed to one long document, helps me focus on organizing before I really begin writing. I think of the slides as index cards or sticky notes that can be arranged and rearranged until I’m sure my thoughts are in the right order. As I write, I can easily toggle back and forth from “Slide View” to “Slide Sorter” to get a sense of the whole and the parts. If I were working in a word processor, I would have to scroll through the entire document to move content around.
I also use color-coding to signal varying levels of completion throughout a deck. Once a slide has a green dot, that means it’s ready to be line-edited.
I can rein in the length. Slides also help me constrain the word count on each page. When writing theHBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations, I set the master font size so I would be limited to about 600 words for each of the 57 tips, to keep them as clear and concise as possible. If my writing extended beyond the bottom of the slide, I knew the tip was too long and would work to tighten it.
I can collaborate easily. Throughout the writing process, I ask for feedback from people I admire. Businesspeople are accustomed to consuming content in slide form, so providing comments on a PowerPoint deck is a natural way to work. Instead of circulating a lengthy draft, I print the deck and post the slides on a wall so others can react to the structure as well as the individual slides. For the first 20 minutes of the meeting, reviewers read through the concepts on the wall and write their feedback on the pages (or on sticky notes); then we discuss impressions and perspectives. In the beginning, my slides are a hot mess, but as I iterate and collaborate, the content gets more and more solid.
On a recent project, my coauthor graciously accommodated this method of thinking and writing, and it worked well. We worked on different sections individually and then recombined them by pasting them back together in Slide Sorter mode. We did have to be careful about version control. When one of us had a section “checked out,” the other couldn’t make changes in it. Google Slides is another option for coauthoring, because you can have multiple people working on slides at the same time. But we intentionally cut ourselves off from the internet for part of the drafting process, so we chose to stick with PowerPoint.
I can design and share the finished document. For printed books, I move out of PowerPoint once I have a solid first pass at the text, because most publishers like to go back-and-forth in Word and do their design in other programs. But for any documents that you edit and design internally, you can publish and distribute your work right in your presentation software. There are huge benefits to doing this — the slides are individual bites of content that can be quickly consumed and easily shared through email and social media. If you’re trying to spread ideas, this is a great format for doing it.
So instead of using PowerPoint purely for presentations, consider it as a tool for creating your next piece of business writing, whether it’s a report, a proposal, an article, or an entire book. It can help you generate, organize, refine, and visualize your ideas in a medium that your colleagues and partners use all the time.
Nancy Duarte is the author of the all-new edition of the HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations, as well as two award-winning books on the art of presenting, Slide:ology and Resonate. Her team at Duarte, Inc., has created more than a quarter of a million presentations for its clients and teaches public and corporate workshops on presenting. Follow Duarte on Twitter:@nancyduarte.
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