<story><title>Matt Blaze: No, You Can&apos;t Have My Slides</title><url>http://www.crypto.com/blog/slideware</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>qntm</author><text>This quote leapt out at me:&lt;p&gt;&quot;[PowerPoint] wants to organize the talk, to manage the presentation. There&apos;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...&quot;&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;If you know the slide numbers you can just type a number to jump to that slide and I believe (don&apos;t quote me on this, I don&apos;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 &lt;i&gt;are&lt;/i&gt; in control of your presentation, not the other way around.&lt;p&gt;And the best bit: most people don&apos;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&apos;ll listen to the rest of what you say.</text></comment>
<story><title>Matt Blaze: No, You Can&apos;t Have My Slides</title><url>http://www.crypto.com/blog/slideware</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>danilocampos</author><text>I love speaking and especially love speaking from minimalist slides. I&apos;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.&lt;p&gt;If you&apos;ve got more than a handful of words on your slide, there&apos;s a huge chance you&apos;re just doing it wrong. If you&apos;ve got a paragraph or more up there, you&apos;re just wasting everyone&apos;s time. Better suited as a book at that point, right?&lt;p&gt;Also, oldie but goodie. Nothing beats Norvig&apos;s rendition of the Gettysburg Address in PowerPoint:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/sld001.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/sld001.htm&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>