I have had the opportunity to give a few talks recently, and so I needed to put together a few slide stacks to keep things on target. For years now, people have been complaining about PowerPoint presentations being dull, and no one likes to see someone read from the screen. But at the same time, every presentation I give comes with a request to make the slides available for download and review by people who are not able to make the talk, or by those who want to use the slides as “notes” from the talk.
So for my last solo presentation, I tried something a bit new. I outlined what content I wanted to cover in regards to slides (to get a count and a ‘content idea’ for each slide). Then I typed out the content that I wanted to cover in each slide in some detail. I then made very text-light slides (mostly images), and then copied the text that I had written into the notes section for each slide. My hope was that the slides would not be distracting text blocks that take focus away from what I am saying, AND that the slide show would be rich with info for those that download it later.
I have not gotten any feedback yet from folks who have downloaded the slides, but the folks in the audience seemed to like the idea, as the system I was talking about had several specks that would have been too much to list on the slides. I told them that the details were in the slide notes, and that seemed to make the tech folks looking for details happy.
I think that this type of production will work well for me, as I sort of like to script out a rough draft of what I am going to say anyway (not to be read from or anything, just as a tool to organize my thoughts) and most of the presentations that I give lend themselves to a visual place-holder model (or graphs). It also helps that I am usually at a conference, and there are lots of other powerpoint slides going on all day, so something a little less text filled is usually a relief to a group that is tired of reading over a presenters shoulder.