Matt Blaze: No, You Can't Have My Slides

This quote leapt out at me:

"[PowerPoint] wants to organize the talk, to manage the presentation. There's always going to be a slide up, whether you need it there or not. Want to skip over some material? OK, but only by letting the audience watch as you fast-forward awkwardly through the pre-set order. Change the order around to answer a question? Tough..."

PowerPoint (and any other presentation software worth its salt) can do this! Press B to replace your current slide with a black screen, W to replace it with a white screen.

If you know the slide numbers you can just type a number to jump to that slide and I believe (don't quote me on this, I don't have PowerPoint) you can set keyboard shortcuts to specific slides in advance too. You can set up your display to show a navigator while the projector is showing the current slide, meaning you can pick the next slide manually without exposing the audience to your fumbling. And a little research will reveal many more useful little options. You are in control of your presentation, not the other way around.

And the best bit: most people don't even know that these things are possible. So when you do them, it makes you look competent and well-prepared, which makes it more likely that they'll listen to the rest of what you say.

I love speaking and especially love speaking from minimalist slides. I'll have whole chunks of the presentation where the slide is just black for a few minutes, because I want to be sure the focus is on the storytelling, not the shiny digital thing.

If you've got more than a handful of words on your slide, there's a huge chance you're just doing it wrong. If you've got a paragraph or more up there, you're just wasting everyone's time. Better suited as a book at that point, right?

Also, oldie but goodie. Nothing beats Norvig's rendition of the Gettysburg Address in PowerPoint:

http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/sld001.htm

As mentioned in the article, Edward Tufte has a similar opinion of PowerPoint's approach to presentations which he wrote about at length in "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within" http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp - a sample of which can be read here: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

What is particularly difficult about this issue is that I have recently enjoyed reviewing slides from talks at RubyConf but am also aware that the most detailed slides may well have accompanied the worst presentations. I'm thinking particularly of talks that amount to nothing more than a speaker reading out their slides which sometimes cause me to wonder: "what value is being added by the speaker actually being here if I could just read this content in my own time?"

I suppose -- as other commenters have mentioned -- there are two audiences for slides:

* People who saw the presentation and want reference material;

* People who haven't seen the presentation and wish to substitute attendance with the slides alone.

Only the former audience is well served by conference organisers blindly demanding slides, the latter lack the context of the talk itself. What would be better is if some more complete version of a presentation was available (video, transcript, etc.) but this isn't always possible or permitted. The danger is that the easier option -- just providing slides -- actually miscommunicates the quality or intention of the presentation for those who weren't in attendance.

It's amazing how reflexive that question is, and I also get it a lot even though I will only, say, use 5 slides for an hour-long talk.

Hell, I have been asked for my slides after a talk where I was obviously just showing live screens in a firefox window. Like, dudes, that's not slides, that's the software.

He may be senior, but he's not making sense. If somebody asks for your slides at your talk, there's a good chance they've seen the talk. So they have the context, they may just want a refresher later. Or maybe they saw something on a slide they couldn't make out before you advanced.

Besides, what do you care? What's the real reason you're refusing?

Here's the logical extension of the suggested alternative: don't bother to give a talk. Just send copies of your papers.

But that sounds silly to me. I think there's probably a reason people both give talks and write papers. So here's my suggestion: if your slides aren't worth giving out, don't show them when you speak.

It's always interesting to see how a speaker reacts to technical problems.

When the projector goes down, or the laptop isn't booting up, watch the speaker. If he's good, it's no big deal at all to him. If he isn't, he'll probably be a mess.

The powerpoint isn't the presentation. Just a small part of it. I mainly reserve mine for funny pictures and bullet points.

I'm interested in understanding why this is being upvoted so aggressively, if someone who upvoted this could share their thoughts. (This really is a serious query- i don't see anything in the content that warrants an upvote).

I also prefer to speak without slides, or with images that don't make sense if you see them alone. After all, it's about the speaker, not the slideshow, as many others have pointed out.

In a situation like that where I anticipate that people might want a "copy of my slides" afterward, I prepare a handout that contains notes, whether in bulleted form or narrative.

If someone is interested enough to want to revisit my talk, I'm honored, and I'm certainly going to put in a little effort to share it with them.

Don't miss the electronic presentation he does distribute (PDF):

http://www.crypto.com/papers/rsa2011-blaze.pdf

Interesting. Surely, you don't need slides. But I understand that powerpoint has its limitations and you may need to use another "presentation" software.

What about Prezi (http://prezi.com/). You can make presentation in more flexible way because of "zooming" concept. Its really ackward to fast forward slides in Powerpoint, but it seems very natural in Prezi where you can focus just on details you want to show your audience, by "zooming" to charts/lists/pictures you want to emphasize and eventually zoom-out to see the big picture.

I'm often asked by conference attendees for the slide decks. Since they just sat through the presentation, I assume that they're perfectly aware of the futility of trying to understand the presentation from the visual aids.

Perhaps they just want one funny picture, or to refresh their own memories of what I said? I give them credit for having good reasons and make them available online, usually before I step on the stage, e.g.

https://github.com/raganwald/presentation_decks

http://www.flickr.com/photos/raganwald/sets/7215762325807370...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/raganwald/sets/7215762264724236...

That being said, I agree with Matt and others here that a presentation can stand alone or it can be a visual aid but it can't be both. So if I want to take the same ideas and put them in writing, I write a blog post:

https://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2010/01/...

Even if his visual aids don't make sense without the context of his talk, it still might make sense to release them. For instance, what if the talk was recorded?

If I can't attend the talk, and am trying to watch it later via a video recording, I'd rather have a separate copy of the visual aids that I can step through while watching the video. That will usually beat the hell out of trying to read the visual aids on the video.

If you can't fit the take home message of your presentation on slides with a few points to a slide, you are presenting material faster than your audience can realistically be expected to take it in - they might nod along, but they probably won't follow your presentation, and they certainly won't remember the details afterwards. Talks are not a good way to convey detail heavy academic material like proofs anyway, that is what conference papers and publications are for.

If you put up slides, some of the audience will be reading the slides rather than listening to you; you can either resist that and not put slides up, or you can use it to your advantage and put what you want to convey in bullet points.

I'm personally of the view that it is better to give people who would rather read bullet points than listen something to read rather than sit there and probably not take anything in anyway.

As a general rule of thumb, I like the 10/20/30 rule: 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30pt font.

I'm not a fan of speaking (although I'm starting to come round to it) and I tend to waffle both on the slides and when talking, so this helps me to keep focused.

Worth reading but the highlight is the slides he sends to organisers "when pressed hard": http://www.crypto.com/papers/rsa2011-blaze.pdf

I think he is perfectly reasonable in not giving out his slides. A lot of people put up slides on slideshare or somewhere else, as if those alone gives you a comprehensible understanding of what subject they are presenting - it does not!

A good presentation has few slides with a few key points, some images and the rest should come from the presenter. In contrast, an article explaining a subject is primarily made up of text, code samples and a few images. If you try to aim for the middle ground, you are going to get something that is sub-par for both.

The author is right about PowerPoint wanting "to organize the talk" - does anyone know any presentation software which breaks from this?

ObAdvert for Tech Talk PSE, the thinking gentleman's presentation aid:

http://annexia.org/techtalk

Why not be nice and give someone a copy of the slides if they want one? His reasoning makes no sense, he just sounds like an asshole.

"from PowerPoint's perspective, I'm usually using it badly"

the alternative to using power point badly takes 0 cycles

I really hope his presentations don't contain any code snippets from any GNU tools source code, or maybe portions of the linux kernel code. His work in in sercurity and this seems most applicable to benefitting from the GPL.