> It's fine for presentations at conferences Even then, the approach taken by Lawrence Lessig (hundreds of slides, very rythmic), makes the point across. Yet t

> It's fine for presentations at conferences Even then, the approach taken by Lawrence Lessig (hundreds of slides, very rythmic), makes the point across. Yet the slides alone are worth nothing without the presenter. The biggest mistake is to think that the slides contain the message, a mistake often shared both by the presenter and the audience. How many times have I heard "can we get a copy of those slides?". If I ever hear this question it means I have failed as a presenter. It's useless and missing the point to ask for the slides. Slides are not the vector of the argument, you – the presenter – are; Slides are merely here to outline the point. Nobody reads the bullets and listen to you at the same time. Nobody will read those tables projected on that small screen at a jittery resolution. It could be bogus data and no one would care yet their mind will focus on it instead of what you say. You built a table to compute a total, so only the total matters. Guess what? Just show the total. Your discourse will expose what the bullets say, your discourse will sum up what's in the tables. Then you nail it by showing the total slide. If people do want the table to check values then its place is not in the slides, it's in a report. A document with content that you hopefully provide when it matters. Slides on the opposite should basically have a very low content ratio in contrast with your speech, or people will simply be distracted from you and read. Worse, they will unconsciously wonder why they're here listening to you when they could just as well read the content by themselves, and end up getting bored.