These are some notes I've collected over the past several years about the best ways to make PowerPoint presentations for IETF meetings. This is still a work in progress. I'm still trying to figure out the "right balance" for using PowerPoint, and I'd appreciate any comments or insights you have.
PowerPoint is a trademark of Microsoft and naturally it refers to their products. However, most of this advice also applies to other tools for making presentations that are similar to PowerPoint.
| 1. |
Start with a blank presentation and a plain format. Turn off the
auto-content wizard or whatever it's called. It's better
to get content right first, and worry about eye candy later.
|
| 2. |
List all of the points you want to make in your talk, in no particular order.
Make a slide for each one, or more than one slide if really necessary.
Use a small font if necessary. Don't worry about being too verbose at
this stage.
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| 3. |
Since the purpose of IETF WG meetings is discussion and resolution
of issues, you should also make a slide for each discussion topic.
For most IETF talks there should be considerably more time devoted
to discussion than to presenting opinions; so you should budget
plenty of time for these discussion points and take care to frame
the discussion topics or questions carefully.
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| 4. |
Now that you have the basic points down, use the slide sorter to
arrange things in a sensible order. Make sure you introduce key
terms, concepts, and assumptions to the audience before you discuss
(or invite discussion of) points that rely on them.
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| 5. |
Determine which things are presented in too much detail and
which things are omitted. Add or remove text or slides as
needed.
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| 6. |
For each point you want to make, or topic you want to discuss,
figure out what image, drawing, graph, or other visual display would
best illustrate that point to the audience or facilitate that
discussion. In some cases there might not be any appropriate image,
but that's fine. There does not need to be a one-to-one relationship
between images or points; in particular, a single image (say a drawing
of a packet format or a diagram showing interaction between several
participants in a protocol) might facilitate discussion of multiple
points.
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| 7. |
Now collect and/or produce suitable images, drawings, charts,
graphs, etc. to accompany your points. You almost certainly
do not want to use PowerPoint to make the drawings or charts
or graphs; it's really pretty lousy at producing drawings or
charts with any significant amount of information content.
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| 8. |
Print out your presentation in some form; you will probably
want to scribble on the printout in future steps.
|
| 9. |
Now "hide" all of your text slides, except perhaps for the ones that
included topics for discussion.
The purpose of typing in this text was to organize your thoughts in a fashion that would make sense when presented linearly. However, you probably do not want to project these on the screen (do you really want your audience to be paying attention to what's on the screen and not to what you are saying?), and you almost certainly do not want to recite these verbatim to your audience (repetition which is so boring it's almost guaranteed put them to sleep!). By hiding the slides you can still make them available for those who download the slides, and you can embellish them with notes that explain the points in more detail. This can be immensely valuable to those who do not attend the meeting, or to those for whom English is not a first language. (See #14 below) |
| 10. | Determine which,
if any, of the graphics you collected or produced can suitably be
projected on a screen using PowerPoint, keeping in mind the inherent
low resolution of the projection hardware and the need to have the
material viewable from the back of the room.
|
| 11. |
If all or most of the graphics can be projected using PowerPoint,
feel free to import them into PowerPoint. If necessary you can add
minor annotations to those graphics (text, circles, arrows, etc.)
within PowerPoint.
If not, consider dispensing with PowerPoint entirely and using other media to assist you with your presentation, e.g. posters, chalkboards/whiteboards, or printouts on paper. Of course, if you need additional facilities beyond those ordinarily provided at the meeting, it will be necessary to make arrangements with the Secretariat, Area Director, and/or WG chair well in advance of the meeting. |
| 12. | If at this point
you are still using PowerPoint for anything, and you believe that your
ability to lead a discussion about the material (not to put
people to sleep or even to irrefutably convince them to adopt your
views) will be enhanced by PowerPoint slides, you can add those to
your presentation. You can also add a title slide at the beginning
and a blank slide at the end.
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| 13. | Some speakers like
to record audience feedback by typing it in to PowerPoint, but this
interferes with the ability of PowerPoint to display a useful graphic,
and it requires that you have PowerPoint in editing mode (this
cluttering up the screen) rather than presentation mode. Occasionally
this works well, depending on the level of detail needed. One problem
with this approach is that the low resolution makes it tempting to
abbreviate speakers' input to the point that essential details are
lost. For this reason PowerPoint should not be used as
the primary record of contributions made or decisions taken
in a meeting.
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| 14. | For the benefit of
people participating remotely, and those for whom English is not their
primary language, please make your presentation materials (whether
they be PowerPoint slides or handouts) available on the IETF or WG web
pages well in advance of the meeting, and announce that the
presentation material is available on appropriate mailing lists.
Please make those materials available in portable formats (e.g. PDF,
PS, HTML) rather than in PowerPoint, Word, WordPerfect, magic point,
Persuasion, or any other format that is specific to a particular kind
of software.
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If this seems like too much work, remember that (for a typical WG) dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people are paying a couple of thousand dollars each to attend a very few meetings like the one in which you're leading this discussion. It takes a lot more time to author a good presentation (or in this case, materials to faciltiate a discussion) than will actually be spent during the presentation or discussion. The speaker's goal should be to maximize the value of that time to the audience and the working group, not to minimize his own time expenditure - and especially not to produce an impressive-looking set of PowerPoint slides.
PowerPoint is lousy at conveying information. The amount of information that you can convey using PowerPoint text or PowerPoint graphics is far, far less than you can convey by almost any other means, including simply speaking with no visual aids whatsoever. By forcing the speaker to distribute a small amount of information over a lot of slides and therefore a lot of time, by diverting the attention of the audience away from what is being said and toward words on a screen, and by encouraging the presentation author to focus on eye candy rather than content, PowerPoint wastes a tremendous amount of very expensive meeting time, not to mention the energy of meeting participants. It also bores and alienates the audience and therefore thrwarts the interaction that is the very purpose of our meetings.
About all that PowerPoint is good for is initially helping your order your thoughts, and projecting low-resolution images onto a screen. And that's all it should be used for. In a small room, the projector is better utilized for showing graphics that help illustrate the problem or the points that are being made. In a large room, the projector is often better utilized for showing live video of the speaker (to make it easier for people at the back to see him or her).
Recommended Reading
Novig, Peter. "The Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation." Lincoln's Gettysburg Address adapted to PowerPoint. http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/.
Searls, Doc. "It's the Story, Stupid". Essay on use of presentation software. http://www.searls.com/present.html.
Tufte, Edward. "PowerPoint Is Evil". Wired magazine, September 2003. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html.
Tufte, Edward. The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. Essay in booklet form, 22 pp. Available from http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp.