Don’t create slides when you should be writing documents

Presentation Zen: “Slideuments” and the catch-22 for conference speakers

insisting that presenters submit their “PowerPoint slides” for inclusion in a future conference booklet or future download from the conference website, conference organizers force their speakers into a catch-22 situation. The presenter must say to herself: “Do I design visuals that clearly support my live talk or do I create slides that more resemble a document to be read later?”

I think Garr is being rather charitible. At work I am increasingly being given slides deques when I should be getting documents and it seems to be for the following reasons:

• If I write a document then that will require the generation of substantive content. However people don’t expect many words on a presentation slide
• Slide deques aren’t proper documents so I won’t have to place them under document management
• I know I’ll need to stand up and present this stuff sometime so I’ll write the material once (see above)

So how do you fix this?

1. Plan and structure your document (if PowerPoint works for you here fine)
2. Write the document using the appropriate text or word-processing tools
3. Create the presentation from the structure and content of the full paper

Thanks to Claudine for sending me to the original article