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In my experience, people also use slides as a document rather than an aide. In all my presentations I prefer to use slides as a companion to my planned speech.
by seventhtiger 1y ago
In my experience, people also use slides as a document rather than an aide. In all my presentations I prefer to use slides as a companion to my planned speech. Then afterwards I'm completely surprised when people ask for my slides. I send them gladly but they're completely useless on their own.
So I have also experienced my managed pushing me to put all the information on the slide so that you can just read the slides and understand all the ideas, and the presenter is reduced to a voice over.
- _9ptr 1y agoI call it two kinds of slides: presentation slides and reading slides. The latter type probably should be a different type of document, but they are wildly popular. And since you're often expected to hand over the slides afterwards, I try to find a middle ground. The slide will have more than 5 words, but hopefully not too many. Pictures/graphs help with this.
- petejodo 1y agoReminded me of this which is a MIT lecture called “how to speak” https://youtu.be/Unzc731iCUY?si=8avRVtQ9blfD43Pf https://youtu.be/Unzc731iCUY?si=8avRVtQ9blfD43Pf
- guidopallemans 1y agoOne thing I like to do is interleave these two kinds of slides one by one. Put your visual on one slide, and longer-text bullet points on the next. Then while presenting the visual you have the bullets of the next slide in your presenter's view, and you can just skip that slide during the presentation. Then, when people ask for the slides they will indeed get all they want.
- Daniel_Van_Zant 1y agoI fight to record any presentations I do as often as possible. When I am asked for the slides I send the full recording instead as the way to manage this exact issue.
- lucumo 1y agoWhat do you expect people to do with that? Spend another hour rewatching the thing? Push it into some AI summary tool?
- Icathian 1y agoIf information is important enough to bother someone asking for a copy of it, but not important enough to spend an hour ingesting, I'm not sure what to tell you.
- lucumo 1y agoWait. I'm unclear what your point is. Is it that asking for a copy is an unreasonable burden that should require a significant time investment from me? I've sent many copies of many things I made in my live. It's not so bad. And it's easily shared with many people at once. Or is it that people can't ingest any meaningful information in less than an hour? That's clearly not true either. A five minute article can contain extremely valuable insights. A 30 second conversation even more so.
- freeone3000 1y agoMy company records all presentations: it’s like sharing the slides, but better, since we just have the entire presentation again.
- lucumo 1y agoAlways recording is a good practice I think. It's so cheap with video conferencing that you might as well. Even if nobody uses it later, it didn't cost much. And if you get that one presentation that provides stellar value it's a gift that keeps on giving. I don't really agree that a recording is always better than the slides. Slides are a text medium, and as such can be searched. You can also go through them much, much faster than through a recording (even if you can listen at 2x). If you're just looking for something specific, slides can be much better. And sometimes you need to get the whole experience. And then the recording is much better.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoI use slides, but heavy on the notes. The notes in each slide, go into detail. I also like to use transitions and animations (not too obnoxious, though). Many of the slides in the shows referenced below, need to be played, as they may have a number of "steps." Makes it worthwhile to ask for my slides, and helps me to stay on track. I generally don't read the notes verbatim, but stay on the topics they describe. Examples: [0], [1], [2], [3], [4] [0] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY/ITCB-master/tree/master/Presentations https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY/ITCB-master/tree/master/P... (A couple of Keynote presentations that are part of a teaching module on Core Bluetooth) [1] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qQDAuhGvBvBlZVH2zn_VjLsW5IrYSOv3fWj9R5QEhWg https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qQDAuhGvBvBlZVH2zn_V... (Google Slides -Discusses effective communication) [2] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/11ZvUjZogJ86-AIsAv1Q38w1yFttCPg833AYtJ0bMfcg https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/11ZvUjZogJ86-AIsAv1Q3... (Google Slides -A basic -and dated- intro to the Swift Programming Language) [3] https://littlegreenviper.com/cruft/CommunicationBasics.pptx https://littlegreenviper.com/cruft/CommunicationBasics.pptx (Downloads a PowerPoint for [1]) [4] https://littlegreenviper.com/a-quick-introduction-to-the-swift-programming-language/ https://littlegreenviper.com/a-quick-introduction-to-the-swi... (Blog entry for [2])
- jampekka 1y agoWhat's appropriate amount of information in the slides depends on the nature of the presentation. For short focused presentations (<10 min) minimal slides are the best if the verbal presentation is strong. For longer and more complicated ones more detailed slides are better for the audience. Audience will get distracted or misdirected at times, and making a clear and well flowing enough speech for more detailed and longer presentations is extremely hard.
- seventhtiger 1y agoI started thinking of those presentations as a joint reading sessions.
- no_wizard 1y agoI think of the (imo legendary) presentation Jobs gave when introducing the iPhone. A brand new product with features and usage patterns that most people never saw before in a mobile device. It had very little of those highly detailed bullet point slides, but you didn’t feel like after watching that presentation you didn’t “get it”. That’s the barometer I think about when it comes to presentations
- CamperBob2 1y agoOK, fine, when I'm introducing a new cell phone model to the public, I'll do it Jobs's way. But that's not optimal for an in-depth technical presentation with actual content behind it. It will annoy the present audience and frustrate future readers. The idea that one presentation style fits every audience, every product, every scenario is just weird. Nothing else on the planet works that way, so why should slide decks?
- matusp 1y agoCompletely agree. Ironically, by focusing on Jobs' presentations, people are admiring the type of presentation that they will probably never do, and they do not consider that it probably cost 100s of man-hours to prepare it. I think it is more important to develop more practical skills to communicate effectively whatever you need, while not spending too much time on the deck preparation.
- bombcar 1y agoTwo slide decks combined into one. Each presented slide should have a hidden slide immediately following that is the corporate style info dump. Then you get the best of both worlds. When you present it - It’s a nice deck of slides that keep people interested and help them to listen to the presentation. But when they download the deck, they see the slides that have all the details.
- xeonmc 1y agoSo kind of like a postcard where one side are pretty pictures and the other is the content?
- MattSayar 1y agoSimon Willison's annotated presentations are the GOAT: slides followed by the transcript of your talk for each slide https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/6/annotated-presentations/ https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/6/annotated-presentations...
- kingkongjaffa 1y agoAs much as Simon’s blog is generally good to stay up to date on LLM’s this is not a good way to do a presentation at all. We shouldn’t conflate expertise from one field with ability in another.
- simonw 1y agoI think you may have misunderstood what an "annotated presentation" is. It's not a new way of giving presentations. It's a way of publishing your presentations after you have given them where you turn the slides into a longer form written piece. So it can't be "not a good way to do a presentation at all", because I give presentations exactly the same as everyone else does! Slides with images and a few words. What's different is that I take the time to write them up properly afterwards. Here's my most recent example - in this case it wasn't a whole presentation, just the slide portion from a three hour workshop: https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/15/building-on-llms/#llm-tutorial-intro.001.jpeg https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/15/building-on-llms/#llm-... Bunch more examples here: https://simonwillison.net/tags/annotated-talks/ https://simonwillison.net/tags/annotated-talks/
- dan-robertson 1y agoYeah, I think this sort of thing is a much better format than a slide deck, even if there’s a load of speaker notes you could read.
- skeeter2020 1y agoI wish Maciej gave more talks, they are always very well prepared and entertaining: https://idlewords.com/talks/ https://idlewords.com/talks/
- bartread 1y agoI got around this by keeping the slides simple but dumping all the supplementary information, including most/all of the presentation content, into the notes section of each slide. That way if I sent people the deck they'd still have all the content. It's a while since I put anything on Slideshare, and I think it now does include notes, but it used to annoy me that back in the day it didn't.
- chrisweekly 1y agoBest advice on this I've encountered: use speaker notes, and optionally distribute them as a printed handout or separate digital artifact.
- Breza 1y agoI've experienced the same thing. I work with ad agencies, and it's common for my client to then turn around and present the same information to their clients, so they'll ask me to put every last word on the slide. It hurts my soul.