Rather different from the bullet point slides I’ve been happily using, as recently as last week (Business use of Web 2.0 technologies to a local CIMA branch, thanks for asking).  It's far more effective to use images or metaphors, as all the speakers did at a cracking conference on social media I attended just a few days later. 

Apparently using images can more than treble your audience’s recall of your presentation, because human memories are both visual and verbal.  Therefore to fix a memory in both systems, you need to use both images and words.

Supose you want to say “The important issues for Project X are Trust, Relationships, Security and Flexibility”.  Instead of a slide with a heading “Important issues” and four bullet points, you’d have slides with images of trapeze artists catching each other in mid flight; two old ladies gossiping on a park bench; a padlock; and a gymnast touching her nose with her feet. You get the picture (ha).

This approach has a couple of implications.  First, speed. It only takes a few seconds for your audience to recognise what an image conveys.  The presenters I saw typically used one slide every 30-40 seconds. 

Second, without the speaker present (in actuality, or as a soundtrack) the slides alone won’t make much sense.  If your presentation is to have an alternate existence on the web, or on your shared drive for colleagues, you need to prepare a version suitable for both uses. 

A web search on "stock photographs" will turn up suppliers of images, or some of the links to free or reasonably priced sources from communications guru Garr Reynold's (admittedly old) blog might still be good.  

I also saw Prezi in action for the first time.  It's a “zooming presentation editor”.    It’s kind of hard to explain, but Prezi seems to be to Powerpoint what mindmaps are to lists (i.e. spacial and visual rather than hierarchical and textual).  I think it's a step too far for me at the mo' - I really should tackle those stubborn bullet points first.