::Don't take the slides:: [/tech/misc] (23:39)

It's hard to put together a good technical presentation. In college, I swore that I'd never do ugly bullet point powerpoint style presentations. Yet here I am years later, finding myself swimming in a sea of bullet points. Where did I go wrong?

My first mistake was in using a powerpoint clone to do my slides. In college, I did slides with latex, which forced me to really focus on using the minimal number of slides to convey my messages. Pictures, diagrams and charts, but few let-me-read-this-list-of-items-to-you bullet lists. Eventually I started using powerpoint clones and quickly fell into the read the slides mode.

I caught myself earlier this year when I moved on to using Keynote for presentations. My presentations improved dramatically after moving to keynote. Powerpoint may win on features, but Keynote is hands down the better presentations program.

Still, even with keynote, I noticed my first few presentations still suffered from the read-the-slides mentality. I've been working hard to move from using my slides as the presentation to using my slides as a tool to enhance my own presentations. My RSS talk at this month's XML Austin User's Group was one of my first experiments in this direction. My talk certainly had problems, but I think I am starting to learn how to give presentations and not slide-readings

My conference talks this weekend are another matter. I hava found it very difficult to escape from slide reading mode here because of the need to provide slide print outs for the audience. You can make presentation slides or you can make take home slides, but you can't really do both.

Conference directors demand printable slides because the attendees demand them. Maybe it's so that they don't have to pay attention during the talk. Or maybe they know most talks are so boring and ineffective that it's better to take the slides and read them later. Whatever the reason, people will complain if your slides aren't readable version of the talk. And that forces presenters into linear, bullet point style presentations.

If you are like me and think that's a bad thing, then let me make a suggestion. Don't take the slides. Don't take them home. Don't take them and read through them during the presentation. Don't even look at them. If you need to remember things, take notes. If the presenter puts up code samples you want to refer to later, ask him if he has a handouts with the complete versions. (not just the 6 lines of code you can fit on a slide)

If you give the speakers more flexibility to give a good presentation, you might get better presentations That's my theory at least.