Why PowerPoint should be banned

Say you are working with a technical crowd, who may well be taking the presentation back with them for further study. In this case, having some depth in the slides might make a lot of sense, as would adding notes and links to information they will need or want. For that scenario, some careful use of bold, color, size will provide talking points useful for interactive discussion. No need to just read the slide.

(I hate it when people just read the slides)

Other times, it might make sense to have very brief bits of info. Often sales presentations go this route, but technical ones can too. People may take the presentation for reference later, but they came for the dialog and or what you are presenting more than they did attend to get all the info in text form.

IMHO, my experience so far has been to know your audience long before you build anything. It's very helpful to get a review from a peer too. If it's important, it's also worth a half hour to talk through with somebody who can provide some insight.

I've also found there is a very significant difference between selling ideas, things and people, and more detailed education type tasks. It's extremely efficient to pack presentations full of info for classroom settings. Depending on what one is teaching, and if it needs some interactive exercises or not, one document may make optimal sense. The people teaching for a living may well be demonstrating a strong bias here, well intended, that just might not be appropriate in a business setting.

Presentations are not substitutes for documents.

At a workshop on presenting information, Edward Tufte introduced the idea of beginning meetings with a high-resolution transfer in the form of a printed document. In short, you prepare a document in advance, print a copy for each attendee, share it at the beginning of the meeting, and give people plenty of time to read and digest the information.

The benefits: -each person can read and learn according to their cognitive style and at their rate of consumption. -time spent taking notes is converted to time spent thinking and analyzing -information can be communicated much, much more quickly than it would be through oration and a deck

I applaud you for doing that, and I personally would have gotten a lot out of your talk. Good, clear, verbal communication is fantastic! Good on you for attempting it. I have similar leanings and skills.

The hard truth I've learned is not everyone can take in it that form. If you have any sort of an audience, the potential for those people will be actualized, and you lose on overall communication fidelity for those people without a visual reference. Secondly, there are people who really need to vocalize to learn, or do something, or experience it in tactile ways, etc... You will find these people asking questions, seeking to be a part of the dialog, taking notes, making motions, drawing, closing their eyes...

Multi-sensory communication is high fidelity as well as broadband. Think of the different axis possible. We often do this with young people, giving a talk, letting them speak, having them touch it, or do it, take notes, etc...

Adults work the same way, though their greater body of experience generally means they are well equipped to handle visual / aural presentations fairly well. You can get the majority of them with a dual style.

This takes some extra work, and might not be in your personal sweet spot, but it's generally worth doing.

YMMV, but 20+ years of communicating to individuals, small groups and crowds composed of amateurs, business people and techies speaking here.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meBXuTIPJQk [2] http://www.treesmapsandtheorems.com/

One way PPT is low-res is that there is not enough room on a slide to type full sentences. It wants you to dilute your thoughts into a bullet list or some similar fragmented format.

Often a presentation involves a series of slides, and ideally you'd want the audience to make comparisons between slides e.g. Before XXX, After XXX, & Therefore XXX is good. The sequentiality of slides is another example of it being low-res. This increases the cognitive effort needed to engage with your content, making it difficult for anyone to actually think critically about what you are saying. In other words, it's a great sales tool!

The paper handout is an excellent idea. You can fit the information of about 250 ppt slides onto a standard 11x17 sheet of paper.

PPT can be useful in other cases (I've used it for drawing seating charts), but it tends to be pretty terrible for presenting any sort of analytical content. I've seen a many PPT presentations from accomplished, smart people, and I can't recall a single one that wouldn't have been more effective as a paper handout.