
Matt Blaze: No, You Can't Have My Slides - adulau
http://www.crypto.com/blog/slideware
======
qntm
This quote leapt out at me:

"[PowerPoint] wants to organize the talk, to manage the presentation. There's
always going to be a slide up, whether you need it there or not. Want to skip
over some material? OK, but only by letting the audience watch as you fast-
forward awkwardly through the pre-set order. Change the order around to answer
a question? Tough..."

PowerPoint (and any other presentation software worth its salt) can do this!
Press B to replace your current slide with a black screen, W to replace it
with a white screen.

If you know the slide numbers you can just type a number to jump to that slide
and I believe (don't quote me on this, I don't have PowerPoint) you can set
keyboard shortcuts to specific slides in advance too. You can set up your
display to show a navigator while the projector is showing the current slide,
meaning you can pick the next slide manually without exposing the audience to
your fumbling. And a little research will reveal many more useful little
options. You _are_ in control of your presentation, not the other way around.

And the best bit: most people don't even know that these things are possible.
So when you do them, it makes you look competent and well-prepared, which
makes it more likely that they'll listen to the rest of what you say.

~~~
eru
Yes. PowerPoint isn't ideal. But people's lazyness is an even bigger problem.

------
danilocampos
I love speaking and especially love speaking from minimalist slides. I'll have
whole chunks of the presentation where the slide is just black for a few
minutes, because I want to be sure the focus is on the storytelling, not the
shiny digital thing.

If you've got more than a handful of words on your slide, there's a huge
chance you're just doing it wrong. If you've got a paragraph or more up there,
you're just wasting everyone's time. Better suited as a book at that point,
right?

Also, oldie but goodie. Nothing beats Norvig's rendition of the Gettysburg
Address in PowerPoint:

<http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/sld001.htm>

~~~
llogiq
The Gettysburg presentation, a true classic. :-) As they say, Power corrupts,
but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.

I also really appreciate the minimalist style. After having seen a few
presentations by Lawrence Lessig and others with similar style, I started to
copy it, but with less slides (mostly because I am too lazy or have too little
to say for the machine-gun-25-slides-per-seconds style).

------
mudgemeister
As mentioned in the article, Edward Tufte has a similar opinion of
PowerPoint's approach to presentations which he wrote about at length in "The
Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within"
<http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp> \- a sample of which can be read
here: [http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-
msg?msg_id=0...](http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-
msg?msg_id=0001yB&topic_id=1)

What is particularly difficult about this issue is that I have recently
enjoyed reviewing slides from talks at RubyConf but am also aware that the
most detailed slides may well have accompanied the worst presentations. I'm
thinking particularly of talks that amount to nothing more than a speaker
reading out their slides which sometimes cause me to wonder: "what value is
being added by the speaker actually being here if I could just read this
content in my own time?"

I suppose -- as other commenters have mentioned -- there are two audiences for
slides:

* People who saw the presentation and want reference material;

* People who haven't seen the presentation and wish to substitute attendance with the slides alone.

Only the former audience is well served by conference organisers blindly
demanding slides, the latter lack the context of the talk itself. What would
be better is if some more complete version of a presentation was available
(video, transcript, etc.) but this isn't always possible or permitted. The
danger is that the easier option -- just providing slides -- actually
miscommunicates the quality or intention of the presentation for those who
weren't in attendance.

~~~
evilduck
Regarding slides as reference material, I've given several tech presentations
at my job, and since I have to make the presentation available afterwards, I
usually include slides that make the slide deck independently more useful
(either interleaved or at the end) but I don't show them during the talk. I
use Apple's Keynote in presenter mode, which makes skipping over slides very
seamless to the audience.

For live tech demos, I've never not had some little screw up either, so if
time permits, I usually make a screencast as a backup and provide that with
the slides. It's time intensive and I've often donated a lot of personal time
to it, but a good presentation makes a huge difference in the support you
receive.

------
frossie
It's amazing how reflexive that question is, and I also get it a lot even
though I will only, say, use 5 slides for an hour-long talk.

Hell, I have been asked for my slides after a talk where I was obviously just
showing live screens in a firefox window. Like, dudes, that's not slides,
that's _the software_.

~~~
evilduck
Conversely, it's a pet peeve of mine when someone proudly distributes their
independently-useless 5 slide slidedeck that accompanied an hour long speech
that wasn't recorded or documented in any way. There are easier ways to get
Dilbert comic strips.

~~~
jules
OTOH I have found slide decks from academic presentations of papers
tremendously useful. You get the gist of a paper in a couple of minutes. Even
reading the slides + reading the paper is quicker than just reading the paper
if the slides are good, because you don't have to reread as much to understand
the content.

~~~
rbonvall
If the slides are good to be read instead of the paper, they were probably
awful as a support for the actual talk.

~~~
jules
True, the best slide decks are slides decks that were intended exactly for
this purpose and not for a talk.

------
beefman
He may be senior, but he's not making sense. If somebody asks for your slides
at your talk, there's a good chance they've seen the talk. So they have the
context, they may just want a refresher later. Or maybe they saw something on
a slide they couldn't make out before you advanced.

Besides, what do you care? What's the real reason you're refusing?

Here's the logical extension of the suggested alternative: don't bother to
give a talk. Just send copies of your papers.

But that sounds silly to me. I think there's probably a reason people both
give talks and write papers. So here's my suggestion: if your slides aren't
worth giving out, don't show them when you speak.

~~~
SeanDav
Actually he makes perfect sense to me, it is his slides that don't make
perfect sense out of context of his overall presentation. He cares because he
cares about making sense, about having his name associated with something that
does not make sense.

~~~
alexqgb
And really, he has no idea what's going to happen to those slides, who else
will see them, or what misconstrued message may come across in the absence of
the talk itself.

~~~
swombat
Tough. Then maybe he shouldn't give talks. Who knows how they may be
misinterpreted, even while he gives the talk!

Communication is an uncertain art. You never know what people are going to do
with what you tell them, even if they do get it clearly. If you don't want to
take that risk, just don't give talks. If you want to play this game, though,
maintaining an illusion that you have some kind of control over the ideas
you're presenting once they've left your mind and turned into some kind of
transmissible form (be it talking, slides, or interpretive dance) is downright
false.

~~~
FluidDjango
Yes, it is always possible to be misinterpreted. But a presentation is an
organic whole designed to minimize such misinterpretation - and usually
designed to do so through careful coordination of slides and audio. I see no
reason to feel _required_ to make a partial presentation available when that
subset might _encourage_ misunderstanding.

Consider: would Apple ever release a Jobs Keynote with _slides-only_. Not
likely. The alternative they provide is to make the entire presentation (or
select portions) available as complete AV presentations (QT or whatever).

------
rriepe
It's always interesting to see how a speaker reacts to technical problems.

When the projector goes down, or the laptop isn't booting up, watch the
speaker. If he's good, it's no big deal at all to him. If he isn't, he'll
probably be a mess.

The powerpoint isn't the presentation. Just a small part of it. I mainly
reserve mine for funny pictures and bullet points.

~~~
tomjen3
That's over simplifying a bit. Even if you are good enough that you are giving
Ted talks on a regular basis, and if you are thank you, you still want to look
as good as possible in front of the client, so you would still want to be able
to do a demo, and that often requires a demo.

But, a good speaker will not let the audience see that he is nervous. Or that
things are not going as he hope for. Confidence, even if based on no external
reason, inspire far more confidence than does nervousness, however
unjustified, and you have to win over the audience before they will listen to
you.

------
hackoder
I'm interested in understanding why this is being upvoted so aggressively, if
someone who upvoted this could share their thoughts. (This really is a serious
query- i don't see anything in the content that warrants an upvote).

~~~
swombat
I'm guessing people are buying into the standard anti-powerpoint rant. I don't
see much value in it either. I don't particularly care whether speaker X wants
to give their slides away or not. But the concept is, as usual, generating a
fair amount of me-too-ism.

Oh well...

------
jaysonelliot
I also prefer to speak without slides, or with images that don't make sense if
you see them alone. After all, it's about the speaker, not the slideshow, as
many others have pointed out.

In a situation like that where I anticipate that people might want a "copy of
my slides" afterward, I prepare a handout that contains notes, whether in
bulleted form or narrative.

If someone is interested enough to want to revisit my talk, I'm honored, and
I'm certainly going to put in a little effort to share it with them.

------
colinprince
Don't miss the electronic presentation he _does_ distribute (PDF):

<http://www.crypto.com/papers/rsa2011-blaze.pdf>

------
jiri
Interesting. Surely, you don't need slides. But I understand that powerpoint
has its limitations and you may need to use another "presentation" software.

What about Prezi (<http://prezi.com/>). You can make presentation in more
flexible way because of "zooming" concept. Its really ackward to fast forward
slides in Powerpoint, but it seems very natural in Prezi where you can focus
just on details you want to show your audience, by "zooming" to
charts/lists/pictures you want to emphasize and eventually zoom-out to see the
big picture.

~~~
v21
I saw someone do a talk using Prezi. It was incredibly shiny and worked pretty
well, but it had a downside. All I really got out of it was that whatever
thing he'd made the slides with was really awesome looking, what is that
thing? Sitting here now I can't recall what the talk was about at all.

------
raganwald
I'm often asked by conference attendees for the slide decks. Since they just
sat through the presentation, I assume that they're perfectly aware of the
futility of trying to understand the presentation from the visual aids.

Perhaps they just want one funny picture, or to refresh their own memories of
what I said? I give them credit for having good reasons and make them
available online, usually before I step on the stage, e.g.

<https://github.com/raganwald/presentation_decks>

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/raganwald/sets/7215762325807370...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/raganwald/sets/72157623258073708/)

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/raganwald/sets/7215762264724236...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/raganwald/sets/72157622647242360/)

That being said, I agree with Matt and others here that a presentation can
stand alone or it can be a visual aid but it can't be both. So if I want to
take the same ideas and put them in writing, I write a blog post:

[https://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2010/01/...](https://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2010/01/beautiful_failure.markdown#readme)

------
tzs
Even if his visual aids don't make sense without the context of his talk, it
still might make sense to release them. For instance, what if the talk was
recorded?

If I can't attend the talk, and am trying to watch it later via a video
recording, I'd rather have a separate copy of the visual aids that I can step
through while watching the video. That will usually beat the hell out of
trying to read the visual aids on the video.

------
A1kmm
If you can't fit the take home message of your presentation on slides with a
few points to a slide, you are presenting material faster than your audience
can realistically be expected to take it in - they might nod along, but they
probably won't follow your presentation, and they certainly won't remember the
details afterwards. Talks are not a good way to convey detail heavy academic
material like proofs anyway, that is what conference papers and publications
are for.

If you put up slides, some of the audience will be reading the slides rather
than listening to you; you can either resist that and not put slides up, or
you can use it to your advantage and put what you want to convey in bullet
points.

I'm personally of the view that it is better to give people who would rather
read bullet points than listen something to read rather than sit there and
probably not take anything in anyway.

------
davedavedave
As a general rule of thumb, I like the 10/20/30 rule: 10 slides, 20 minutes,
30pt font.

I'm not a fan of speaking (although I'm starting to come round to it) and I
tend to waffle both on the slides and when talking, so this helps me to keep
focused.

------
akent
Worth reading but the highlight is the slides he sends to organisers "when
pressed hard": <http://www.crypto.com/papers/rsa2011-blaze.pdf>

------
doppel
I think he is perfectly reasonable in not giving out his slides. A lot of
people put up slides on slideshare or somewhere else, as if those alone gives
you a comprehensible understanding of what subject they are presenting - it
does not!

A good presentation has few slides with a few key points, some images and the
rest should come from the presenter. In contrast, an article explaining a
subject is primarily made up of text, code samples and a few images. If you
try to aim for the middle ground, you are going to get something that is sub-
par for both.

------
kilps
The author is right about PowerPoint wanting "to organize the talk" - does
anyone know any presentation software which breaks from this?

------
rwmj
ObAdvert for Tech Talk PSE, the thinking gentleman's presentation aid:

<http://annexia.org/techtalk>

------
smrtNgtsThngsDn
Why not be nice and give someone a copy of the slides if they want one? His
reasoning makes no sense, he just sounds like an asshole.

~~~
whomelse
I agree. I don't know who this guy is, but if the superior holier-than-thou
attitude that drips through that blog post is any indication, I'm surprised
that anyone would ever ask him to speak. At least not twice.

Earth to Blaze: get off your high horse.

------
meatsock
"from PowerPoint's perspective, I'm usually using it badly"

the alternative to using power point badly takes 0 cycles

------
iopuy
I really hope his presentations don't contain any code snippets from any GNU
tools source code, or maybe portions of the linux kernel code. His work in in
sercurity and this seems _most_ applicable to benefitting from the GPL.

