Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

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Love it. However, I think that this does not apply to every situation. It's fine for presentations at conferences, or presentations designed to convince an audience of a certain view or standpoint.

But if you've been asked to research a set of options for viability, for example, things are different. You'll need bullet-points with highlights, tables with totals, and conclusions that summarize the main differences. Such things are very well presented with slides. I believe that this is the kind of stuff Powerpoint was originally invented for.

Similar stuff if I'm going to explain Coffeescript to a room full of C# programmers; I want examples, on slides.

There's probably more examples like these. The moment you want the audience to make up their own mind (which option do I prefer? do I want to use Coffeescript?), you need to present facts, not just a story. I strongly doubt just telling people how cool Coffeescript's => operator is will get the point across very well.

If my audience wants hard facts, I'm going to put it on slides, whether or not my CEO has a 3 slide rule.

> It's fine for presentations at conferences

Even then, the approach taken by Lawrence Lessig (hundreds of slides, very rythmic), makes the point across. Yet the slides alone are worth nothing without the presenter.

The biggest mistake is to think that the slides contain the message, a mistake often shared both by the presenter and the audience. How many times have I heard "can we get a copy of those slides?". If I ever hear this question it means I have failed as a presenter.

It's useless and missing the point to ask for the slides. Slides are not the vector of the argument, you – the presenter – are; Slides are merely here to outline the point.

Nobody reads the bullets and listen to you at the same time. Nobody will read those tables projected on that small screen at a jittery resolution. It could be bogus data and no one would care yet their mind will focus on it instead of what you say. You built a table to compute a total, so only the total matters. Guess what? Just show the total. Your discourse will expose what the bullets say, your discourse will sum up what's in the tables. Then you nail it by showing the total slide. If people do want the table to check values then its place is not in the slides, it's in a report. A document with content that you hopefully provide when it matters. Slides on the opposite should basically have a very low content ratio in contrast with your speech, or people will simply be distracted from you and read. Worse, they will unconsciously wonder why they're here listening to you when they could just as well read the content by themselves, and end up getting bored.

"The biggest mistake is to think that the slides contain the message, a mistake often shared both by the presenter and the audience. How many times have I heard "can we get a copy of those slides?". If I ever hear this question it means I have failed as a presenter." I can not agree more. A presentation must be a tool to support your ideas, your information, your thoughts. Not the way around.

I don't think it means anything at all. People mostly ask for slide decks out of reflex, often because they weren't paying attention because they know they can get the slides later on.

We live in the same world indeed, so imagine what it means to get out of the room without having even remotely been asked the question.

(ok this could mean you totally crapped out, but I guess you could tell the difference)

You're really kicking my leg here. I see your point and cannot refute it, but it feels bad.

You don't ever need bullet points. Also, I don't really like lots of code on slides (maybe one or two lines are ok), better code live in those situations (yes, this is possible, I have done it a couple of times). You should always have a story, even if you tell facts.

> You don't ever need bullet points.

This intrigues me. How would you present summaries or pros/cons of options?

I'm talking e.g. a presentation that compares various web UI frameworks for a to-be-developed project that involved multiple parties / departments. Not the typical startup situation no, but common nonetheless.

Ah, I forgot, all generalizations are wrong ;)

Sometimes presenting every point on a separate slide works quite well - never done it myself, but I have seen some good presentations where this technique was used. I guess this could become quite annoying when overused. But it might work for comparisons: One slide for every aspect that is compared.

You could also prepare a separate handout that contains the detailed pros/cons or comparisons and keep the slides minimalistic.

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