[castillar76]

I had similar problems at work until I realized there were two competing agendas at play. One group wants the slides to be "here's a record of what I talked about so people who didn't make it can read it later", while another wants the slides to be "here's stuff that supports what I'm talking about now". Those are fundamentally incompatible, and it's a bad idea to try to use a deck generated for one purpose to satisfy the other.

One potential solution is two slide decks--one for the presentation and one as a "reading deck", but that's a pain in the neck. Another option we're currently using at work is to go with the Amazon 6-page-paper: write what you're going to talk about, and then the slides are only to support the actual presentation. The paper is the thing people read if they missed the meeting.

[jbaber]

I came to the same realization and started putting all the text for the "reading version" in the presenters notes part. The first slide says "If you're reading this on your own, press 'p' for presenter mode" or whatever.

[castillar76]

Smart! I just wish PowerPoint had better support for content formatting in the notes. It’s really barebones and hard to edit—more like working with text in an Excel cell than a proper document. (Which kind of makes sense, from their perspective.)

[teknopaul]

most slide formats support graphics and notes to cater for this.