[captainmuon]

I don't know. Over time, I've learned to appreciate the kind of slides physicists make, which follow all the "worst practices". They are very dense, with lots of plots and text. They are like, I imagine in the olden days, when people would draw things on blackboards or print out their plots, and sit around them and interpret them. They are the material, and what the presenter does is walking the audience through the material. Compared with a scientific paper, they lack all the prose and weird formal phrases that make papers hard to read. You basically just show what your colleagues need to work with, not less or more. Most importantly, you are not trying to persuade anybody.

My experience outside of academia is that people use PowerPoint exactly for persuasion. Even to the degree that when I wanted to prepare a presentation internally, one of my bosses got angry because he thought I was going to bullshit him. (PowerPoint is something you do to a customer or to the board, not to your colleagues.)

[toyg]

Your boss must have been traumatized by some salesman.

PPTs are great, when they have been written by someone who knows what to communicate and how to do it, which involves knowing your audience. For boffins, slides that are denser than average but lighter than what they would otherwise have to read, are just fine. For the layman, one better err on the side of simplicity and direct impact.

> PowerPoint is something you do to a customer or to the board, not to your colleagues

That is bullshit borne of insecurity. If one can be persuaded so radically by a presentation, one's convictions are pretty weak to begin with.

[PaulHoule]

I've been taught that if you are selling high tech products to C-levels at the biggest companies you want to have highly information dense slides (e.g. condense 2 slides into 1, then condense 2 of those slides in 1) but also have them well organized so you can make a presentation that drives home a few key points.

Personally I am a big fan of powerpoint for making "boxes and lines" diagrams about how a product works, what process we're using, things like that. I love making stuff like

https://www.slideshare.net/paulahoule/making-the-semantic-we...

[toyg]

> at the biggest companies you want to have highly information dense slides

One of my bosses got that memo - the whole thing is one single giant slide with 12 indicators or so. Their sessions are hell, they make people roll eyes and disengage out of boredom. The message I get is that they either don't really care to interact with us hoi polloi, or are just bypassing their own inadequacy at managing a deck at speed - which is understandable, but at that point why are you even there?

IMHO, if one has 6-9 segregated boxes on the same slide and is going to describe each one, they could have been 6-9 slides with exactly the same content but bigger and more impactful. But people have grown to fear the whitespace (can't help themselves overfilling each slide) and transitions (the dreaded pause and meaningless "let's read the title" which is horribly endemic in the States), so they go for this compromise. The impatient reads the whole slide and tunes out, but is not annoyed at you for keeping him from doing that, so it's considered a win. Still, he's not listening to anything you're saying - you could have as well just sent an email.

(It might well be just a fad. C-levels love fads like your next person. In fact, they often love creating fads, just to watch the monkey dance.)

IMHO, a slide should have the elements you're linking together to make a single point. If the point is "sales are good but margin is bad", you'll need a few graphs in the same slide, for sure. But you need transitions at some point to keep people awake and focused on the train of thought you want them to ride. Even in a TED talk, where you really just want people to look at you and only you, the occasional flash of light from transitions is necessary to keep the senses engaged.

[the_snooze]

>My experience outside of academia is that people use PowerPoint exactly for persuasion.

It happens in my corner of academia too, and I'm all for it. When I give a talk, I'm trying to persuade people to read my paper and ask me interesting questions about the work. The paper has all the gory details. The point of my talk isn't to duplcate the written text, but to make it accessible enough that people want to learn more.