this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
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[no solution for you, just a comment] - making slide presentations is such a waste of time that I actually think this is a great use case for AI-driven automation.
That's because most people don't know how to make them. When your presenter is basically reading the slides to everyone and making a few comments, they're doing it wrong.
I would like to add a few more tips, based in my experience in an academic background:
Don't go back in the presentation to refer to something. If you want to refer to a slide/graphic you already explained, you put the slide/graphic once again, but do not go back several slides.
Use big fonts. Text should be clearly readable in any part of the room you are presenting.
References and sources should be put as a footnote in each slide, not as a big ass slide at the end of the presentation.
Enumerate your slides.
Time and flow quality is just as important -or maybe more- than the visual quality. It is a must to stay behind a 10% error margin of the alocated time. So in a 10 minutes presentation, always stay between 9 and 11 minutes (ideally between 9:30 and 10).
I would push back on 7 and 8, and say footnotes shouldn't be part of your slides at all. Those are for documentation and reference materials you hand out, not the slides during the presentation. Avoid any incentive to look at something other than the screen.
I would double down on 9. Presentation flow is absolutely number one. Looks don't matter much at all. I only use simple black text on white backgrounds, inverting it for impact. Nothing fancier.
I just assumed 5 and 6. If you ever have to go back to a previous slide, I just thought you made a mistake and forgot something. Planing to do that is just kind of insane. And yeah, people with poor eyesight should be able to read it from standing against the back wall.
Disagree on 7 and 8
For 7: References and sources are a must, unless everything is your own work. They should not be put at the end of the slides because the public does not have access to your file, so they cannot go back and forth to properly read the source like they can in a paper. The way I do this is simply putting "Source: blablablabla" in a smaller font, so the reader can easily recognize it as a source and ignore it if they want to.
For 8: This greatly improves the public's ability to ask you questions, as they can just say you "Please go back to slide #X", instead of having to explain the content of the slide.
Keep in mind these are used in my scientific academic background, perhaps outside of it they are not as important.
There are a lot of things I don't like about academia's traditions.
Having references and sources is a must. Putting them on screen during a presentation is not.
The presentation is not the authoritative final version of the research for others to reference. It's the quick entertaining version. It's the advertisement for the paper. The paper needs the citations. The presentation just needs to entertain and entice. A presentation is a kind of performance. A one person play of sorts. Audience members don't stop a play in the middle to check sources, or ask questions. Q&A comes after the presentation is finished. You can have a separate slide deck, of only charts and graphics with corresponding numbers that you hand out to the audience specifically for questions. But that's not part of the presentation.
Or at least it should be that way.
The reference adds stuff like the author, journal or year, so it can be a showcase for the relevance, importance, how new is it, etc. I still find it useful in cases like the presentation not being followed by a paper, or you add visual aids that are not present in the paper yet are not your own work.
Knowing or not how to make them, they're still barely useful. They convey less information than a written report, and nobody goes back to a slide deck for reference if given a choice between that and a PDF. When printed as handouts, they're a waste of paper. Their "need" basically comes down to graphic information, which could be in a boring report too.
A report usually contains somewhat useless information, requires more background in the topic and does not allow for easy to ask questions to the author. Slides, written reports, papers, speech, etc. all serve different purporses.
all that depends entirely how one is writing the report and might also apply to slides
You're still just thinking of how everyone currently uses them. Which I said was the wrong way. None of the uses you mentioned has anything to do with the presentation it's self. You know, the part where you're lecturing in front of a group of people. Knowing how to make a slide deck is all the difference in how useful they are.
What I suggested, flat out, can not be used for anything you said. You might have 70+ slides for a 10min presentation. But it works great during the presentation itself. (What it's supposed to be for). My style guide works for emphasizing points, entertaining and maintaining attention, so people remember more and don't need to reference as much later. It makes the actual presentation better. Not just something to replace notes or reference materials for later. If you're designing your slide deck to actually hand out for people to read, it'll be rubbish for the actual presentation.
Then each executive's AI can just review the slides. Then the AIs can send a string of pointless emails back and forth to each other, come to a consensus and share the decision in an email blast to the whole company.
Wait.. why do we need execs again?
And that's why tools like gamma.app exist