I prefer to be short than to get my public tired.
Some people seem to get off on taking longer than necessary
the slides will be in our corporate colors: yellow text on a pink background …
And the presenter will regularly quiz attendees on the content
Not quiz as such. More like “any questions so far?” at the end of each slide, but will not give you time to ask anything “no? Ok, moving on”
Or the awkward 5 minutes of silence when no one has a question at all.
I’m more prone to making the slides be my notes, possibly with data-driven visual aids. 3-5 short bullet points per slide is usually reasonable. I don’t actually give a lot of presentations these days, though.
I hate these kinds of slides because I’ll come across them somewhere and be like “WHAT THE FUCK IS THE CONTEXT FOR THESE NUMBERS??? WHAT DOES THIS HALF-ASS DIAGRAM REPRESENT?” and the information I extract becomes less usable as a result.
I often won’t read PowerPoints in that style unless a recording of the presentation is available, otherwise I just pretend it doesn’t exist and get my information elsewhere because certainty ain’t optional mf.
I think if you’ve chosen your bullet points well then the point should come across through them, but if you’re looking for a higher level of detail then the slide deck is probably not gonna get you there regardless. It’s standard practice to record this type of presentation, but if you’re really wanting a deep dive, you probably want to see the supporting documents, not just an executive summary. I guess it depends on what kind of presentation we’re talking about, too, because a presentation to push info up to management is pretty different from the type someone might give at a conference.
I take this to the extreme: my slides have little to no text, or even white space. Each slide is basically a collage for pointing at while I rant about the thing. I’m a mechanical engineer, so I also imitate the sounds the machine makes.
My issue with this is that I’d like to be able to distribute the slide deck afterwards for people who can’t attend. I’ve heard people advocate for keeping separate infosheets to accompany the presentation but I can’t be bothered usually.
If my stage performance is unnecessary, then it would be better suited as an email than a presentation. If it is necessary, then they’ll need to watch the video.
I’m not going to create the same message twice in two formats. If they disrespect my time, then I might not be a good fit for their corporate culture.
Wow! What a quick reader!!
Just send the powerpoint and an audiobook at this point and add a comments section
Better yet, just send me a transcript, or just the PowerPoint. I don’t need someone to read to me. I can read faster than they can talk.
just the transcript please – PowerPoint is a horribly bloated file format if you’re doing nothing more than transmitting text …
The powerpoint has a logo I made in Paint and a meme at the beginning and a meme at the end. Also the animations are bliss.
I also added sound to the transitions. These are absolutely necessary to understand the Content of the Presentation.
And we’ll take at least ten minutes of the presentation time to try, fail, and retry to get the audio working.
People who do this shouldn’t be in management.
As Dilbert laid out
Even the most intelligent worker will become an idiot once they are put into management
Being in management is surprisingly more difficult than it appears to be when you’re not in management.
You deal with the employees’ problems and higher management problems while not being able to influence the company or fully protect your employees.
This is a terrible position I hope to never be in again.
I believe so. Middle management is probably one of the worst positions to be in. No real power to change anything but people do expect it from you.
Also, if you can’t fucking type properly (ie touch type) you’re not competent to manage others.
There are non-labor people alive today who can’t touch type?
My best presentation at university was during a small seminar. It was a 45min talk about 3 papers and how they relate to each other. I procrastinate a lot, so I didn’t really do anything besides reading those papers until the day before my presentation. That day, a friend called for a spontaneous barbecue, so I had just an odd hour to actually prepare slides. I managed 8 slides in total, the rest I just impromptu recalled from memory. People liked it and it was the least effort I put in any talk I held at university.
Honestly, that’s the right way to do it if you really know your stuff.
The slides are there as a visual aid or backdrop. The “presenter notes” is where all your bulleted items and prompts for recollection go.
Also, and this is where a lot of people get it wrong, the slide deck is NOT a useful document for distribution. It is specific to both the subject matter and speaker; it’s analogous to sheet music. A video of the presentation (e.g. TED) is far more useful as we’re really talking about a performance. At worst, there should be “references” page in some appendix, with hyperlinks to actual media that folks can digest on their own time.
what’s a slide deck?
The slides in the presentation. Old people term
reading those papers
Woah there Mr. Overachiever, you’re making the rest of us look lazy…
People who aren’t good at presentation making think that they are supposed to convey absolutely everything they are saying and be crammed full of information. I was doing a group presentation sometime ago where my group members insisted I put paragraphs of info in my slides and were worried we would fail for not enough information. Even after explaining that they were meant to guide the audience in what I was going to say, they insisted that it was wrong
Good old PowerPoint karaoke
Death by a hundred slides.
This is the waterpark I want to go to this summer.
death by a hundred slides water park you say?
At university, I had a lecturer who took this one step further. Instead of a power point, he used a word document that he read word by word.
We had one who pulled up the pdf of the textbook to read it word by word
legere (lat) to read => lectura (lat) the reading event => lecture (en) => lecturer (en) a person giving/hosting a reading event.
A lecturer is supposed to read the text of a book to students so that they are able to write it down and obtain a copy of it for themselves.
Books written by professional scribes are incredible expensive, and this new thing they established in Bologna in 1088 – the so called “universities” offering lectures will be a major breakthrough in the history of mankind to distribute knowledge!
Good to know some professors still honour the only true way of teaching.
A lecturer is supposed to read the text of a book to students so that they are able to write it down and obtain a copy of it for themselves.
Does this still happen, with digital and all?
If the lecturer hasn’t got the notice books can be cheaply printed and purchased nowadays, probably yes. What is this digital your speeking of?
Bruder …
books written by professional scribes are incredible expensive
some things haven’t changed …
Pfff this generation is wasting good expensive sheets of paper when good old oral tradition has worked for thousands of years. Writing was invented only 4000 years ago and still haven’t caught on.
it’s a fad, like medicine
You sure they weren’t just sharing the wrong screen?
Also:
Presenter: Can we hold all questions to the end, please? Thank you!
The end obviously never arrives.
Usually there aren´t any at the end. Perhaps only one or two people actually paid attention and they don´t want to put themselves in the spotlight.
It arrives, but by then there’s no time for questions.
Ugh, I always tell students to avoid this.
That said it reminds me of Larry David on Conan podcast of how he got out of a movie test screening. “I’ve got one question and then I’ve gotta go…”.
Ah, treasures, both of them.
I remember back in high school my teachers would always warn students for doing presentations like that, yet all of them did exactly the same thing. And it was even worse in university, when we had to listen to 2 hours presentation read word by word with monotone voice.
Hug the monotone voice is the worst. A colleague of mine does that. If you are making a presentation and you sound bored all the way through, guess how your audience is going to feel?
If you sound too enthusiastic, you might wake people up.
Wakes up
-Wait a minute… you’re full of shit!
Yup! I even tell them to experiment a little because they get full points either way (my logic is, the social pressure alone is enough to get a good effort, and usually that’s true lol).
It’s because they didn’t trust their ability to remember stuff. But when I lecture, I’m often elaborating beyond the bulletpoints, engaging my audience with questions, making eye contact, etc, so it’s not like I’m not setting a good example. I guess my university it’s just too late to teach?
I always feel obligated to reword so it doesn’t seem like I’m reading off the slide. But then people are reading the slide and listening at the same time and I’m not sure it’s better.
If the slide has all the information, then it’s a poor slide deck.
The slides are supposed to be an outline. The rule of thumb is max seven lines and max seven words per line.
Here’s a couple examples.
Good slide:
- Revenue: -10% vs Estimate
- Industry trends
- Low demand for new products
- Strong demand for XYZ
Also good slide, depending on who you’re presenting to:
- Revenue: -10% vs Estimate
- Industry: -3%
- New products: -30%
- XYZ: +4%
Bad slide:
- Revenue is 10% below estimate
- Industry has seen a 3% drop in sales
- New products ABC and MNO have had a 30% lower demand than we expected
- Product XYZ has higher demand than anticipated with sales 4% higher than estimate
All the extra information on the bad slide can be delivered by the presenter. It’s not necessary on the slide. The slide is for people to glance at to assist them during and after the presentation and to help them anchor themselves in the discussion.
I like your examples, you really capture how the definition of a “good” slide is context and audience dependent, and yet despite this, a “bad” slide is something that can be understood fairly objectively.
Lets hope they forgot to run spellcheck
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