[mudgemeister]

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.

[evilduck]

Regarding slides as reference material, I've given several tech presentations at my job, and since I have to make the presentation available afterwards, I usually include slides that make the slide deck independently more useful (either interleaved or at the end) but I don't show them during the talk. I use Apple's Keynote in presenter mode, which makes skipping over slides very seamless to the audience.

For live tech demos, I've never not had some little screw up either, so if time permits, I usually make a screencast as a backup and provide that with the slides. It's time intensive and I've often donated a lot of personal time to it, but a good presentation makes a huge difference in the support you receive.