Scott on Writing

Feedback

# re: Presentation Style: Lots of Slides or Few? 1/14/2005 10:33 AM Richard Dudley

For my master's thesis, I had 82 slides (literally a full deck, since we used carousel projectors at the time) for what should have been a 45-50 min presentation. I timed it perfectly in practice. However, when I get rolling in front of an audience, I tend to really roll, and the entire presentation took slightly over 30 minutes (roughly 25 seconds per slide). People's eyes were spinning in their heads. I took a lot of heat for that in my defense, and even lost a few marks because I refused to admit I had too many slides. I felt (and still do) that every slide was important. Although the professors hated it, it was one of the few theses the first year students and those from other divisions could follow along with, since everything was explained so clearly. Their comments meant more to me than the marks.

As an audience member, I greatly prefer a stand-alone deck, where I can take a few notes on the slides and in the margins. I have been to a number of presentations where there were few slides, and the value of that presentation was lost shortly after, since I couldn't recreate what was said by memory and notes.

When I give a talk, I still emphasize important points as they need to be--sometimes a bullet list will do, but sometimes you need 1 or more slides to get the point across.

You'll always find someone who doesn't think you needed all those slides to make your point to them. This is kind of arrogant, I think, since the slides weren't for them, per se, but for the people who wouldn't have gotten the point otherwise. And for the ones who want to remember the point.

If you were to look at all the slide decks I have saved, I've written all over them, and I still refer to some a year or so later. Not every slide was shown in these talks, either. Some were background material that was skipped over because the speaker did a straw poll of the audience, or had a good enough rapor to know what was needed and what was not.

# re: Presentation Style: Lots of Slides or Few? 1/14/2005 10:57 AM Walt Lounsbery

The previous comment only briefly touched on a valuable technique that may improve your presentations. Keep a lot of the detail content as backup slides for the speech, to be distributed as a "package" outside your actual presentation. This is especially good for including demo content in the "package" without disturbing the demo flow in the presentation. I think everyone appreciates the extra detail when the presentation slides are published.

I've done plenty of "dense" presentations in bad PowerPoint. Over time, it sinks in that the audience responds more to the speaker than the screen. So the slides are really there to show outlines and graphical ideas. Few people can or will take notes directly off the screen, they want to listen to what you are saying. Given that, let those slides go by at about one every two minutes and focus on the audience connection.

Of course, if you are presenting the derivation of Einstein's Field Equations, you might want to put those equations on the slides rather than scratching them out on the blackboard every time...

# re: Presentation Style: Lots of Slides or Few? 1/14/2005 5:35 PM Dan Guidara

I agree with you whole heartedly on the benefit. When I attend a presentation, I do not want to take any notes. In fact, very rarely will I show up with any paper at all. I am there for the speaker and not for his slides. If I enjoyed the presentation then I will review the slides.

The other benefit of having detailed slides is I can easily share the information with others without having to go, "here is where he talked about x,y and z".

# re: Presentation Style: Lots of Slides or Few? 1/16/2005 8:27 AM Richard Dudley

Two more excellent points!

With today's presentation software, it's even easier to have a stable of intro slides you can flip to if/when needed. Most presenters these days are jumping into and out of various Virtual Server instances, VS demos, and slides. If you do it well, you can bring these slides in at any point, and refer the audience to the back of the deck.

I also like to share the decks from good presentations, and like Dan said, a detailed deck makes it easier to do so. I have justified exploring a technology to a boss based on one bullet point on one slide. I can say whatever until I'm blue in the face, but if it's printed on an expert's slide, well then it has to be true.

# re: Presentation Style: Lots of Slides or Few? 1/16/2005 4:08 PM Garfield

I personally prefer more detailed slides. It's very annoying when I want to review something later, to have to try to remember what the speaker was saying at various points.

But the best thing would be to get the PowerPoint file itself, so one could take notes directly on the computer (providing of course that one has a laptop with him). It's of course possible to take notes on the computer without the PowerPoint file, but it's a lot easier to connect the notes to the appropriate slides with the file.

# re: Presentation Style: Lots of Slides or Few? 1/17/2005 1:52 PM Chris Gastin

I like the way you approach this. I am the type of person who enjoys listening to the presentation, and latter trying it out for myself. I tend to take some notes, but I do not want to be writing the whole time. When the slides have finer detail of information then I am able to enjoy the presentation, and later I can dive into the material.

# re: Presentation Style: Lots of Slides or Few? 1/18/2005 10:46 AM Ike

I think more slides keeps me engaged with the presentation longer. As a listener, I get tired of seeing the same slide for a long period of time.

# re: Presentation Style: Lots of Slides or Few? 1/18/2005 5:09 PM Greg Dunn

Detail is good, if you're well-organized.

# re: Presentation Style: Lots of Slides or Few? 1/21/2005 2:18 PM Kent Sharkey

I tend to fall into the "few slides" camp myself. I think (it's been a year or two since I gave a talk) I do <20 slides including title, intro, etc. for a 1 hour talk. If I add more content, it's invariably in the notes section for people who download the talk.

I remember the Mighty Rob telling me he was about to give a talk with no slides, all demos, and I remember hearing it was well received. On the other side of the fence, Pat Helland averages about 70-80 slides for 60 minutes (also usually well received).

I guess it's just my ADD kicking in, but I tend to go into Powerpoint naptime frequently in talks.

TTFN - Kent

# re: Presentation Style: Lots of Slides or Few? 1/23/2005 8:06 PM Scott Allen

I have about 30 in a deck for a one hour presentation I'm doing next month. I feel this is a little heavy, but at the same time this material will be put into a booklet for people to review afterwards. Some detail has to get through to the booklet.

# re: Presentation Style: Lots of Slides or Few? 1/30/2005 10:41 AM Davor

I believe that the number of slides is pretty much irrelevant. The important issue to resolve is why you are using slides at all. If you are using them as an aid for speaking - then you have to find an optimal number of slides for yourself depending on your speaking abilities and nature of material. I usually prefer speaking with no slides whatsoever, but sometimes I am required to have them if it is a heavy technical presentation (though it is questionable even if you have many formulas/code/graphs if slides are useful due to the difficulty in both explaining for the speaker and understanding for the audience during the speech time). So if you are quite verbose in your writing - I would recommend going with as few slides as possible as you are probably quite verbose in your speaking as well and can keep audiences attention. If you want to make lecturing material out of your slides, I would make separate copy for distribution and distribute only at the END of the presentation - never in advance...

# re: Presentation Style: Lots of Slides or Few? 2/17/2005 5:13 PM Janay

I think this blog was very informative and would have liked to see more feedback comments. But the ones you published were excellent. I'm forwarding this to my partner, an engineer who needs to make a very important presentation.

Title:
Name:
Url:
Enter the code you see:
Comments
Remember Me?