[cryptonector]

Most slide decks I ever see I see long after they are presented. As a result I want slide decks to stand alone -- that or else video to be published instead of slide decks.

As a presenter I have to worry about whether my slides will be seen w/ or without video of my presentation. Therefore I try to make my slide decks able to stand alone, though I admit this is not great.

The common pattern now instead is to make colorful and near-content-free slide decks where the presenter simply speaks with colorful backgrounds. I am terrible at crafting such slide decks -- well, I've not tried. This pattern works while presenting though, and I should probably adopt it. Or perhaps I should adopt the Jeff Bezos approach.

What presenters and audiences need is a commitment to publish video of presentations, including Q&A segments. And video has to be playable at 2x speed.

(Yes, almost every video I watch I watch at 2x speed. Where platforms allow faster playback speeds I've even gone faster. Speech is extremely low-bandwidth. This does mean I've to backtrack more often than I'd like, but it's still better this way. I pay attention more when speech is faster -- up to the point where I can't follow, of course, and which I shy away from.)

[the_snooze]

>Most slide decks I ever see I see long after they are presented. As a result I want slide decks to stand alone -- that or else video to be published instead of slide decks.

I use presenter notes precisely for what you're describing. My actual slides are sparse, but I distribute slides with full presenter notes so all the main points get across in a written form after the fact, without distracting from the talk.

In Powerpoint, I use the "print to PDF" function and tell it to generate pages containing slides with notes.

[gregmac]

Yeah, this is a good idea.

I'd add a tip: start writing your notes in the speaker notes and leave the slides blank, instead of the other way around (which is kind of what PowerPoint's UI pushes you towards). Only create the actual slide content after refining your speaker notes once or twice.

For me, at least, I find it's much easier to add content to the blank slide than it is to refine (aka: erase words from) the sentences I initially type out. I tend to like slide content that is graphics (photos, screenshots, graphs, diagrams), titles, or lists of short headline-style text (1~3 words).

[cxr]

> start writing your notes in the speaker notes and leave the slides blank, instead of the other way around (which is kind of what PowerPoint's UI pushes you towards). Only create the actual slide content after refining your speaker notes once or twice.

At that point, you might as well extract those notes into a proper technical report—which is the _actual_ conclusion that Tufte came to:

> Attempting to have slides serve both as projected visuals and as stand-alone handouts makes for bad visuals and bad documentation. Yet, this is a typical, acceptable approach. PowerPoint (or Keynote) is a tool for displaying visual information, information that helps you tell your story, make your case, or prove your point. PowerPoint is a terrible tool for making written documents, that's what word processors are for.

(Aside: Did anyone actually click through and read Tufte's original "PowerPoint Does Rocket Science" (that this piece borrows liberally from—and then perverts)? This piece amounts to middling-quality reblog spam, except worse—because it comes with the added downside that it injects some synthesis about the slide in question (containing "a huge amount of text") being described as too long. Anyone following up and checking sources will see that not only is this not supported by Tufte's work, but it wouldn't be a stretch to say that what is presented here as a summary of the work of Tuft et al runs counter to what they had to say.

It gets truly bizarre when you start reviewing the samples that Tufte provided. It turns out that the slide pictured in this article is not even the slide that was "in play" during the relevant incident. If this blog post were a serious publication (instead of a grey area, slightly scummy, content-marketing afterthought that it is), it would constitute academic fraud...)

[cryptonector]

Nice, I like that!

[nunez]

There is a great example of this from the fine folks at ITA Software (now Google Flights). Their founder wrote basically a paper on the challenges of writing airline ticket optimization software…in PowerPoint. The slides are thin on information but the speaker notes explain everything.

Since seeing that, I double-down on making my speaker notes tell the story for those that couldn’t be in the room.

[cryptonector]

Presenter notes though are intended to help the presenter, and their form is not great for users who missed the presentation. As well, the presenter often does need presenter notes that are terse and not suitable for the public. We need slides that are shown at the presentation, slides not shown at the presentation but which are public, and presenter notes.

[the_snooze]

I think that's the presenter's responsibility. I use the presenter notes to organize my thoughts. By the time I give a talk, I already have most things memorized and only need to grab a few phrases here and there from my (rather detailed full-sentence) notes. The notes easily stand on their own.

It's certainly an improvement over the usual ineffective way people make slides and give talks: by reading bullet points off the slides themselves. I keep over 90% of the text for my talks in the presenter notes. It's equally useful for prepration and for future reference.

[crdrost]

Video is of course not necessary, just sufficient.

What you want are the talk notes, something you can read to understand what the shape of the talk was, what context each image came out in. The video of the actual talk substitutes quite nicely for these notes.

It would be preferable if more presentation media had a “front of card/back of card” approach where the card itself specifies how long it thinks it should be on the screen (evaluable over “timing runs”), bullet points for the speaker and readers of the printed form, as well as the image that will be shown.

[cryptonector]

> Video is of course not necessary, just sufficient.

It should be so, but that means writing different materials, one for the actual presentation, and one for everyone who couldn't be there. It would be better to have the video.

Mind you, for accessibility and general user-friendliness, you want both. But audio/video is a great help because there will be things that the off-line materials miss.

> It would be preferable if more presentation media had a “front of card/back of card”

Yes. PowerPoint and the like generally have a public / presenter distinction, but we want three distinctions: online / off-line / presenter.