Bullets

[fj]

They always tell you to put minimal text on presentation slides, especially for points that you will present as well verbally. Certainly do not make your PowerPoint a written copy of what you want to say. But that never addresses that the last 7 'presentations' I made got presented maybe only once, if ever, but were mostly passed around as a sort of e-mail brochure to read alone from a screen. It's kinda hard to make a presentation that works as both a presentation and a hand-out.

Comments

[urbear]

The standard that I try to adhere to for presentations is "7 by 7"... no more than seven bullet points, no more than seven words per bullet. After all, you're giving a presentation, not reading a speech from the screen. If too much of the presentation is already up there on the screen the audience will read ahead and not pay attention to what you're saying.

If you want your presentation to double as a handout or "brochure", PowerPoint allows you to associate a page of notes with each slide. Originally this was intended as speaker's notes, but they've expanded the feature to allow the notes to be heavily formatted with fonts, bullets, etc. The notes are visible under the slide in the default PowerPoint on-screen view, and when you print the file you have the option of printing each slide and its associated notes. Unfortunately the only print format for this is one slide per page, but that's usually fine.

[qnetter]

Actually, I'm learning to be even more graphical with slides, if they're not too technical -- "Presentation Zen" is an aspirational model around here (forgive the inadvertent semi-pun -- it's a book title). But then, yes, the answer to handouts is the notes field.

[urbear]

You're right, graphics are important. I tend to think in terms of text myself, and I have no artistic talent whatsoever (and rarely have access to a good graphic artist) so my presentations are text-heavy, unfortunately. I try to make up for it by being an entertaining presenter; the reviews say that I usually succeed.

The flip side is over-reliance on graphics, distracting animations, and other dancing baloney...

[qnetter]

I have the same tendencies, but am trying to train myself to make at least 10% of my slides completely wordless.

It depends on what you're presenting -- if the goal is to take people's technical notes for them -- to show them command line syntax, for instance -- text is unavoidable. But if you're presenting to influence, a much, much more graphical approach is in order. I'm not sure you can over-rely on graphics -- though you certainly can overuse "animations and other dancing baloney." Again, it depends on the audience and the level of information. (Lessig's "Change Congress" pitch is a good example of an essentially graphics-only presentation that really works -- though I'm extending the concept of "graphics-only" here to include phrases, but no bullets. The approach moves even more responsibility to the speaker -- but i'm sure you are that good. I am too, on my best days.)

[italiangm.livejournal.com]

You could do what I did: Place URLs to detailed documents in the PowerPoint presentation and store the documents on a website.

Of course, the website I used was internal. Assuming you'll need a public-facing website, determine the right mechanism to protect proprietary/confidential content and publish access requirements in the PowerPoint presentation.

[nooks.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure I remember that Tufte recommends making slides and handouts.

[excessor.livejournal.com]

I think the trend to minimalism in presentation slides is highly contextual. It's true that for general topics you can reduce the amount of text on the slide. It's certainly true that you don't want to read them to your audience, especially if the information is widely known already.

Here at Big Networking Company, some people do their project specifications in PowerPoint. Issues and resolutions are done via powerpoint, as are project plan overviews (with links to more detailed documents), project recaps, etc. It is awful and yet I do it too. I tend to be more text focused because unneeded graphics take up more room and I'm a bad artist.

On the other hand, a colleague told me that her best presentation consisted of slides that each had one word on them. She was presenting to VPs and they were very upset that there was no text to read. She told them she wanted them to put down their electronic toys (PDAs, smartphones, laptops, etc.) and pay attention to what she's saying, and not just read the volumes of text she could have put together. They told her afterwards it was the best presentation they'd seen that year. I suspect it was the one they actually paid attention to.

[fj.livejournal.com]

I think the trend to minimalism in presentation slides is highly contextual. It's true that for general topics you can reduce the amount of text on the slide. It's certainly true that you don't want to read them to your audience, especially if the information is widely known already.

Here at Big Networking Company, some people do their project specifications in PowerPoint.

See that's the things, these days PowerPoints have to do both, and that gets barely acknowledged.

[raimondas.livejournal.com]

+1 on this. And the suggestions above of either putting the "handout text" in notes or putting just URLs on slides would just decimate your slide-reading audience, since half of them will not bother to look at notes/URLs.

Unfortunately the only clean way to do it is to have two versions of the slides: talk and handout. And even then readers would complain that they are not getting the same thing that they saw during the talk...