Don Box on giving presentations and conundrum of slides vs. whitepaper

If you are doing any conference speaking or hoping to, definitely watch this Channel9 video.

One of the things I have the hardest time with is the amount of content on the slides. Don and Mike talk about this. What is the purpose of the slides? A tool for the speaker? A visual aid for the speaker/audience? Or a whitepaper? I tend to go for the whitepaper because I want people to be able to go home with those slides and still have a great reference. Then I will skip whole slides or some points on certain slides during the talk. I would love to minimize the content on the slides during the presentation. I think that I am even comfortable doing this with talks I have done a few times. But I still want the audience to have more than a few bullet points to refer to when they go back to their computers.

I will be thinking about this as I prep for Connections, Windows Anywhere and EdgeEast over the next few months.

The A#1 most important thing according to Don (and I wholeheartedly agree from experience) is get enough rest. “Don’t stay up till 4am working on your demos”. Being rested and alert will carry you through a lot more then being, as Don suggests, an exhausted encyclopedia.



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