Any meeting involving PowerPoint can be an email instead. Just email the deck to people. If they have questions, they can either email you or request a meeting. But don’t interrupt people if all you’re going to do is make them follow along while you read through a presentation.
If your PowerPoint slides contain all of the information that you intend to present, it’s a shitty PowerPoint deck. A slide deck should only highlight the key points you are going to make, or to illustrate your points. The bulk of the information transfer should be verbal, with words that do not directly appear on your PowerPoint slides.
Go watch any professional presentation from a big organization ever. You’ll notice most of what the presenter is saying does not appear verbatim on the slides.
Problem is that this takes a lot of effort, because you’d have to separately provide a handout. So, I imagine, for most company-internal presentations, the slides are the handout.
Personally, I’ve never seen such a slide-handout which was self-explanatory (well, and handouts aren’t supposed to be).
But at the same time, the ‘presentation’ of the slides is often not done by the person who created the slides, and done with minimal preparation, so yeah, many times they just consist of the presenter reading the slides out loud and spitballing what they might mean on-the-fly.@bionicjoey I work at a big organization. (It’s one of the Big 4 accounting firms.) Enough of what the presenter is saying appears on the slides that the presenter is irrelevant.
I don’t read out PowerPoints, I just put pics and titles usually. But yeah, if you just read off your slides verbatim, the verbal component is pretty useless.
If your PowerPoint can be simply emailed and explain all you would have in a meeting, you’ve made a bad PowerPoint presentation.
Tho, in general, the need for PowerPoint has drastically waned in this more digital world.
If your PowerPoint can be simply emailed and explain all you would have in a meeting, you’ve made a bad PowerPoint presentation.
That’s one of things whose existence people expect me to accept despite never having seen them for myself:
- God
- unconditional love
- compassionate conservatism
- relevant ads
- media tie-ins that aren’t crap
- adaptations superior to their source material
- a good PowerPoint presentation
If someone emails me a deck, I’m not reading it.
@florge Neither do I unless it’s directly relevant to my work. Most of the time, though, it’s just rah-rah corporate culture bullshit. I still attend these calls (with my mic and speakers muted) because people notice when I don’t even though I’m never called upon to speak. Then it’s all, “He never attends all-hands meetings. He’s not a team player.”
Neurotypicals gonna neurotypical, I guess. This is what I get for becoming a programmer instead of an electrician.
