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Linked from Tufte’s article, I found this interesting comment from someone’s experience at Microsoft: [1] > Attempting to have slides serve both as projected v

Linked from Tufte’s article, I found this interesting comment from someone’s experience at Microsoft: [1] > 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. I think that’s on point for many companies. A lot of the terrible slides you see in meetings are actually intended as documentation after the fact, and few people recognize (or care) that this makes for a terrible presentation. Ironically, I think Powerpoint isn’t such a bad tool for creating handouts. If the intended reader reads the document on their screen instead of printing it, a nice PDF with screen-shaped pages might actually be close to optimal. You just have to be 100% clear whether you’re creating a document or a presentation. [1] http://mamamusings.net/archives/2005/11/19/the_culture_of_the_deck.php http://mamamusings.net/archives/2005/11/19/the_culture_of_th...

rahimnathwani 5y ago
"a nice PDF with screen-shaped pages" Right, but you can create such a thing with a word processor. Just change the page size or orientation. Sure, the page breaks might not default to where you want them, but you can add page breaks wherever you want, and don't need to create a text box for each paragraph.
- sosborn 5y ago
  More importantly (to me anyway), copying large swaths of text is so much more reliable in a word doc. Copying text in a pdf (derived from PowerPoint no less) is a special hell.
  - hypertele-Xii 5y ago
    Unbelievable, I've never copied text from a PDF without some error. It's baffling how broken that system is compared to say, text selection in web browsers. If you start doing fancy CSS tricks you can break that too, of course.
    - db48x 5y ago
      In a PDF, every single glyph could be independently positioned. Most aren’t quite that pathological, but frequently every text run is independent.
      - PaulHoule 5y ago
        A PDF can contain metadata that correctly sequences the characters which is great for cut-n-paste, accessibility and reflowing the text. That metadata is frequently absent and the mechanism for incorporating it is by no means simple.
NikolaNovak 5y ago
100%. One of the things I'm drilling into my team (we do a lot of slides!), is you have to decide - are you making slides for: 1. presentation - should be sparse, key, anchoring data that enables people to ground themselves while they listen and pay attention to YOU or 2. Reference - dashboard and background and details and density If a deck may be used for both purposes, intentionally or not (e.g. we expect it to be shared and referred to by people not attending), resist the urge to do a hybrid slide, and if at all possible make presentation slides at front, reference/supplementary slides at back. Worst situation is when somebody uses what are effectively reference slides for a live presentation. People's attention is split between reading and making sense of dense information on screen, and the key important points you are trying to verbalize.
- zeruch 5y ago
  "resist the urge to do a hybrid slide, and if at all possible make presentation slides at front, reference/supplementary slides at back." This has been my SOP for years, but its amazing how resistant some folks are to it (like $NUMBER_OF_SLIDES is the sole measure of quality...with "more slides are bad, mmmkay" being the default). I fought with my last boss on this endlessly, as I would rather have many slides with small digestible chunks of info that I could scaffold my presentations through at a brisk clip, and they preferred as few slides as possible, with dense text and charts, that they would elaborate on in long exposition. I always got better positive feedback, to no avail. My decks would be 'edited' into a compacted slop-fest. Drove me batty.
- potatolicious 5y ago
  One effective way of juggling the two types of slides I've found is to stick the reference slides into an appendix that isn't part of the actual presentation - but can be quickly pulled up during ensuing discussions, and for the benefit of people reviewing the slides later. High-level stats during the actual presentation, meaty details available upon request.
captainmuon 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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-web-work https://www.slideshare.net/paulahoule/making-the-semantic-we...
jccooper 5y ago
Powerpoint even has a special mode for creating handouts, by printing a non-displayed notes section. There's no need to put the outline on the slides... other than being less effort.
greggman3 5y ago
What's are "screen-shaped pages"? My screens are all kinds of ratios and orientations. I wish pdf would die. It's a left over vestage of a paper world. It's also left over from a non-connected, non-international world A4 vs US Letter. PDF really has no place in this smartphone first world
- gcthomas 5y ago
  Pdfs are terrible for letter style docs on phones (reflowable text is better, say in emails), but they are great as slides. Certainly easier to distribute or display than proprietary PPT editors.
  - rayiner 5y ago
    Reflowable text is fine for conveying information on a tiny screen, but that’s about it. When your screen is bigger than a page, reflowing the text is almost never what you want because long lines are hard to read. Thus even though computer screens aren’t limited to the size of a sheet of paper, you want to wrap your lines at paper-width (or better, book width) anyway. Note that programmers typically define an effective page width for source code by enforcing an 80-100 column limit.
- rayiner 5y ago
  > PDF really has no place in this smartphone first world :shivers: Makes me think of being forced to dig a hole with tweezers.
cryptonector 5y ago
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 5y ago
  >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 5y ago
    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).
endymi0n 5y ago
This. I remember the day when I casually asked my cofounder, an amazing storyteller, how his day was. He answered: „Awesome. I had 8 slides this morning. Now I have three.“ That day, something fundamentally clicked in me. I learned that day that condensing and sharpening information towards a punchline is real, hard and meaningful work. Or, as Mark Twain once said, “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.”
- pklausler 5y ago
  It was Blaise Pascal in his Lettres Provinciales.
  - earleybird 5y ago
    For an in depth review of the phrase: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ I am partial to Woodrow Wilsons' variation on the theme; something resonates when I'm asked to for a development/programming estimate.
Cosmin_C 5y ago
I work in the medical field and my brain cells have been constantly assassinated for years by bad presentations. Every once in a while I find unicorns - people who tell a story, teach and present using Powerpoint/Keynote slides as support - conveying information that is hard to put into words -> a photograph, an animation, some simple flowcharts to refer back to whilst talking about what is really the subject of the matter. I've seen Powerpoint since medical school evolve from trying to squeeze as much information as possible on slides to utter nonsense and hundreds of words per displayed page. Heck, just stay home and automate your presentation to display the slides and mail them to your students instead, don't do this. I've also been guilty when having to turbo half ass wing a teaching session of stuffing a lot of text in my slides. But I was aware this was not appropriate and I always tried to not be "that person". However, when you have 30 million presentations per day around the world, this is almost impossible to do.

rahimnathwani 5y ago

"a nice PDF with screen-shaped pages" Right, but you can create such a thing with a word processor. Just change the page size or orientation. Sure, the page breaks might not default to where you want them, but you can add page breaks wherever you want, and don't need to create a text box for each paragraph.

sosborn 5y ago
More importantly (to me anyway), copying large swaths of text is so much more reliable in a word doc. Copying text in a pdf (derived from PowerPoint no less) is a special hell.
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago
  Unbelievable, I've never copied text from a PDF without some error. It's baffling how broken that system is compared to say, text selection in web browsers. If you start doing fancy CSS tricks you can break that too, of course.
  - db48x 5y ago
    In a PDF, every single glyph could be independently positioned. Most aren’t quite that pathological, but frequently every text run is independent.
    - PaulHoule 5y ago
      A PDF can contain metadata that correctly sequences the characters which is great for cut-n-paste, accessibility and reflowing the text. That metadata is frequently absent and the mechanism for incorporating it is by no means simple.

NikolaNovak 5y ago

100%. One of the things I'm drilling into my team (we do a lot of slides!), is you have to decide - are you making slides for: 1. presentation - should be sparse, key, anchoring data that enables people to ground themselves while they listen and pay attention to YOU or 2. Reference - dashboard and background and details and density If a deck may be used for both purposes, intentionally or not (e.g. we expect it to be shared and referred to by people not attending), resist the urge to do a hybrid slide, and if at all possible make presentation slides at front, reference/supplementary slides at back. Worst situation is when somebody uses what are effectively reference slides for a live presentation. People's attention is split between reading and making sense of dense information on screen, and the key important points you are trying to verbalize.

zeruch 5y ago
"resist the urge to do a hybrid slide, and if at all possible make presentation slides at front, reference/supplementary slides at back." This has been my SOP for years, but its amazing how resistant some folks are to it (like $NUMBER_OF_SLIDES is the sole measure of quality...with "more slides are bad, mmmkay" being the default). I fought with my last boss on this endlessly, as I would rather have many slides with small digestible chunks of info that I could scaffold my presentations through at a brisk clip, and they preferred as few slides as possible, with dense text and charts, that they would elaborate on in long exposition. I always got better positive feedback, to no avail. My decks would be 'edited' into a compacted slop-fest. Drove me batty.
potatolicious 5y ago
One effective way of juggling the two types of slides I've found is to stick the reference slides into an appendix that isn't part of the actual presentation - but can be quickly pulled up during ensuing discussions, and for the benefit of people reviewing the slides later. High-level stats during the actual presentation, meaty details available upon request.

captainmuon 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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-web-work https://www.slideshare.net/paulahoule/making-the-semantic-we...

jccooper 5y ago

Powerpoint even has a special mode for creating handouts, by printing a non-displayed notes section. There's no need to put the outline on the slides... other than being less effort.

greggman3 5y ago

What's are "screen-shaped pages"? My screens are all kinds of ratios and orientations. I wish pdf would die. It's a left over vestage of a paper world. It's also left over from a non-connected, non-international world A4 vs US Letter. PDF really has no place in this smartphone first world

gcthomas 5y ago
Pdfs are terrible for letter style docs on phones (reflowable text is better, say in emails), but they are great as slides. Certainly easier to distribute or display than proprietary PPT editors.
- rayiner 5y ago
  Reflowable text is fine for conveying information on a tiny screen, but that’s about it. When your screen is bigger than a page, reflowing the text is almost never what you want because long lines are hard to read. Thus even though computer screens aren’t limited to the size of a sheet of paper, you want to wrap your lines at paper-width (or better, book width) anyway. Note that programmers typically define an effective page width for source code by enforcing an 80-100 column limit.
rayiner 5y ago
> PDF really has no place in this smartphone first world :shivers: Makes me think of being forced to dig a hole with tweezers.

cryptonector 5y ago

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 5y ago
>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 5y ago
  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).

endymi0n 5y ago

This. I remember the day when I casually asked my cofounder, an amazing storyteller, how his day was. He answered: „Awesome. I had 8 slides this morning. Now I have three.“ That day, something fundamentally clicked in me. I learned that day that condensing and sharpening information towards a punchline is real, hard and meaningful work. Or, as Mark Twain once said, “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.”

pklausler 5y ago
It was Blaise Pascal in his Lettres Provinciales.
- earleybird 5y ago
  For an in depth review of the phrase: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ I am partial to Woodrow Wilsons' variation on the theme; something resonates when I'm asked to for a development/programming estimate.

Cosmin_C 5y ago

I work in the medical field and my brain cells have been constantly assassinated for years by bad presentations. Every once in a while I find unicorns - people who tell a story, teach and present using Powerpoint/Keynote slides as support - conveying information that is hard to put into words -> a photograph, an animation, some simple flowcharts to refer back to whilst talking about what is really the subject of the matter. I've seen Powerpoint since medical school evolve from trying to squeeze as much information as possible on slides to utter nonsense and hundreds of words per displayed page. Heck, just stay home and automate your presentation to display the slides and mail them to your students instead, don't do this. I've also been guilty when having to turbo half ass wing a teaching session of stuffing a lot of text in my slides. But I was aware this was not appropriate and I always tried to not be "that person". However, when you have 30 million presentations per day around the world, this is almost impossible to do.