[seventhtiger]

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.

[bombcar]

Two 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]

So kind of like a postcard where one side are pretty pictures and the other is the content?

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I 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/P... (A couple of Keynote presentations that are part of a teaching module on Core Bluetooth)

[1] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qQDAuhGvBvBlZVH2zn_V... (Google Slides -Discusses effective communication)

[2] 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 (Downloads a PowerPoint for [1])

[4] https://littlegreenviper.com/a-quick-introduction-to-the-swi... (Blog entry for [2])

[MattSayar]

Simon 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...

[skeeter2020]

I wish Maciej gave more talks, they are always very well prepared and entertaining:

https://idlewords.com/talks/

[dan-robertson]

Yeah, 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.

[kingkongjaffa]

As 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.

[jampekka]

What'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.

[no_wizard]

I 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

[seventhtiger]

I started thinking of those presentations as a joint reading sessions.

[bartread]

I 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.

[Daniel_Van_Zant]

I 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.

[strogonoff]

Few things are as frustrating as finding slides from what seems to be an insightful talk strongly pertaining to what you are working on, but no recording of that talk to watch.

I applaud the effort to record such talks, especially in the current age where you know few people will actually watch it and appreciate your effort (but some big LLM provider will certainly lift it as part of a mass scrape and charge a few bucks for access to your findings without crediting you).

[lucumo]

What do you expect people to do with that? Spend another hour rewatching the thing? Push it into some AI summary tool?

[Breza]

I'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.

[_9ptr]

I 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.

[guidopallemans]

One 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.

[petejodo]

Reminded me of this which is a MIT lecture called “how to speak”

https://youtu.be/Unzc731iCUY?si=8avRVtQ9blfD43Pf

[chrisweekly]

Best advice on this I've encountered: use speaker notes, and optionally distribute them as a printed handout or separate digital artifact.