Comments on: Sacred Cow #7: All You Need Is An Afternoon

By: Richard I. Garber

Richard I. Garber — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:16:27 +0000

The worst examples I have seen looked like they were slapped together by the presenter during a plane trip to a conference. At the last minute it is hard to resist cutting and pasting a huge table from Word or Excel into a PowerPoint slide. Big tables work for a written document like a handout. For an audience who can’t read them easily and quickly they can induce sleep.

Financial types may begin by showing the annual statement for a corporation. Materials and processes engineers may begin with a table showing the detailed chemical composition of each material (perhaps 12 to 15 columns) as discussed in one of my very first blog posts: http://joyfulpublicspeaking.blogspot.com/2008/0...

By: WVMikeP

WVMikeP — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 10:39:39 +0000

I agree this will be a tough nut to crack. It's going to take, at a
minimum, patience and persistence.

By: Oliver Adria

Oliver Adria — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 10:09:33 +0000

Hi Mike,

I agree with you there. If you look at only the slides of many great presentations (if they used slides at all), you might not understand the whole story. Many great presentations only use images and short video clips, how are you supposed to understand the story behind it? E.g. Lawrence Lessig's presentation at TED won't be helpful if he weren't talking while his slides are showing. It's the content that matters, not the slides.

But this will be very hard to change. The office culture of “can you present some slides for tomorrow morning” will still be around for a while, so it's important to find a compromise.

Though, I wonder, will there ever be a time when bosses say “Please make a presentation for tomorrow. Make a good storyline – use slides if you want.” .

Oliver