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If you know what the presentation is about from reading the slides then those are bad slides. Slides exist to support a presentation and should not make sense without someone explaining it.

If you want to understand without attending a presentation then what you want is a paper, or book. Those are very different formats.

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In many organizations this is bad advice.

I've given many presentations where I has to provide the slides, which were then repeatedly emailed as samizdat. Easy 10x as many people only read the slides, but a document would not have reached them at all.

It all depends on your audience.

Do not confuse documents written in power point with slides written in power point. Power point is a tool, it is often abused to write documents even though that isn't why the tool exists it does work. Many people prefer power point documents because it makes you think about bulleted lists which is what they want to see, but those are documents not slides.

This is true if the slides are for a presentation, but unfortunately, many people in business (coughconsultantscough) use the deck as their deliverable and cram all the information in there. A memo or report would be better in most cases, but the culture is what it is, and at the end of the day, if the CEO expects a deck, the CEO is going to get a deck.

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