What's worse than reading off slides?

It is bad enough that some people tend to read from slides. Even worse is, when people put conversational words on the slides and then read it. What I mean is words like "Now let's go to the next slide" highlighted with an arrow. This is what you would say. It is completely useless for your audience and clutters your slides with distractions from the real content.
Put these transition words or phrases for dramatic effect ("here we go.......") on your notecard or just remember what you want to say. Your audience will thank you a million and you can take the next step towards more professional slides.

When to hand out your handout

Well almost as any debated issue: it depends ;-)

Think about what you want to achieve with the handout.

If you want the audience to fill in blanks or make notes to the slide, obviously you need to hand it out first. I don't really like that approach. If you give your audience a handout with your slides and space for notes, they are likely to browse through the slides and make up their mind before you have introduced yourself.
If you have matrixes or graphics, charts and graphs, I recommend you to print them out separately and give them out beforehand. If you have additional information on a handout, give it after your talk.

Don't forget: The audience came to your presentation to watch you present. Not to read your slides.

I have written more detailed on handouts here.

What you can do with a table on a slide

My first suggestion would be to take it off...
if your table has more than 4 columns and rows and more than 15 words, I would really suggest this.
Split up the table. There are probably multiple ideas comprised in there. Give each idea its own slide and explain or visualize it. You can then use a simplified table to sum up your findings with one or two words per columns.
And then use a powerful feature build into most software packages: Building.
Build columns or rows one by one. Maybe even cell by cell.
The audience won't be overwhelmed with information and it should be easier to grasp.

The annoying thing about web-presentations

Over the last couple of month I watched a couple of presentations delivered purely on the web as well as a couple of webinars.
So the "presenter" sits behind its computer and talks into a microphone while the slides are passing through.
I saw similarities to many presentations. Less visual and more wordy.

But there was one thing I could not stand.

The presenter put literally every word on the slide he said. Full sentences, and even words & phrases like "I'm not kidding" or "let's see where this takes us". Words and phrases you say in a conversation or presentation but not on a slide.
It was sort of a caption for each slide, but if this was the caption, there was nothing on the slide!

I mean I could still hear the person talk. It was a video. If you think it is important that everybody knows what you are saying, then put in small captions in grey on the bottom of the video but don't make it the content of the slide!

The same rules apply for web-presentations as for normal presentations.
Make slides visual and try to visualize concepts and points you want to get across. Provide a handout or even a transcript if necessary.

Did you experience similar situations in webinars or web-presentations. What where your thoughts?

Best wishes for the upcoming week!

Trade-offs

The most common trade off people seem to make in university presentations is visuals for text. Less visuals, but more text.
Why is that?
I hear the argument: "Well you can review your slides better for recap." so often. I think this is harmful for a presentation. In university, the content should be presented in a visual way, so that concepts are understood more easily and academic literature becomes more engaging. For recap, there should be a handout with text, which can be reviewed easily.
How about that for a counterargument?
Let me know what you think.
Have a good week.

The Big Picture

In her book "Resonate", Nancy Duarte puts a presentation into the perspective. If you take a report as one extreme and a story as the other, a presentation should fall in between these two extremes.

She describes reports as exhaustive, informational and factual. The structure is usually hierarchical. They are delivered in a plain, direct, and precise manner. I think about an academic thesis or business report. Mostly text paragraphs, few graphs and tables, and some bulleted lists.

On the other hand there are stories. Novels & movies. Emotional and dramatic.

Now as reports need all your focus and attention in order for you to grasp the underlying message, a movie tries to touch your other senses and emotions to get the message across.

Now presentations should fall somewhere in the middle.
Where they are placed depend on the presenter and the environment.

In a university setting I see presentations put right next to reports. Paragraphs put into bullets, if at all, and then onto slides. Maybe decorated with some pictures and then presented.

I think presentations need to be pushed more towards the middle. A presentations purpose is to explain the detailed data from the report as visually as possible. If you take the format from the report and put it onto slides, it's still a report. In oder to become a presentation, there need to be some elements from a story incorporated.

Prevent a disaster in a group presentation

Among so many things that have to be considered when delivering a group presentation, the worst case scenario is someone not showing up. Your presentation is rehearsed perfectly, you agreed on meeting an hour early to prepare, but there are some instances where someone could not make it somehow.

Now you need a plan B for this kind of scenario.

For once, all presenters should be familiar with the topic of each one. But it might be to complex for everybody to know every part. Here is what you could do:
- partner with one of your team members and exchange notes on the presentation at least one day before
- at least read through the notes of your partner a couple of times and ask any questions that are unclear

This won't take much time and nobody will expect you to know the others part perfectly, but you can impress anybody by stepping in and delivering the part.

So take a couple of minutes to exchange each others notes and familiarize yourself with each others part. If it should happen that someone can't make it, your presentation won't be at stake.

Have a good week!