“If your presentation visuals taken in the aggregate (e.g., your “PowerPoint deckâ€) can be perfectly and completely understood without your narration, then it begs the question: why are you there?” — Garr Reynolds, Is it finally time to ditch PowerPoint?
linux.conf.au 2007 opening ceremony
This is why I rarely publish my presentation slides: They’re always written with the assumption that I will be presenting them. The combination is the performance. I almost feel as though I’m cheating someone by only giving them the slides. How are they going to enjoy all the jokes?
Someone ought to put a bounty on the openoffice presentation program so that when a slide reaches a certain level of verbosity or a certain number of bullets, a popup alert appears admonishing the user that “Slides must illustrate without narrating.”
Obviously large sections of text in fixed-width fonts would get an exception.
I like to publish slides with additional notes attached under each slide. It takes some time to prepare, but I think it can be useful to ones that can’t make it to a live talk if video coverage is not available.
Here’s a program I wrote to create bullet-point-free presentations in GNOME: http://nat.truemesh.com/archives/000678.html
“It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented.”
— John Sweller
I absolutely agree with this definition. No matter what toolset is used, if used poorly it is a poorly used tool. Powerpoint and like tools are great when used appropriately. I will never read slides to an audience, it is a waste of time and really pisses of the participents. You must talk to the slide, use the slide to visually present the idea. There are significant articles on how to create and deliver great presentations, and how to use the tools effectively in a presentation. I have seen certain people present for 2 hours over three slides and absolutely captivating in delivery with spot on use of those three slides to support and enhance the message of the presentation. Tools being used effectively is the point
By the way, it’s amusing how few people notice the duplication of “more” on that slide. It’s like we know the quote back to front or something…
> I’m cheating someone by only giving them the slides. How are > they going to enjoy all the jokes?
There were jokes?
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MC