From thesis text to slides. How to ease the process? I spent a considerable amount of time to write my thesis. Now I have to create the slides for the defense. I thought it was going to be easier, but found important difficulties creating them. I would like to have a method to make it easier, at least the first draft. Starting with a section, I will try to create a slide from one paragraph, although they can be further divided in more than one slide. I thought about:


convert to bullets each sentence of the paragraph, or set of sentences of related topic. This slide may be further removed.
in a different slide, replace text from previous slide with images from cited references, and try to memorise the necessary part of the replaced text. This will be specially useful for the introduction. On the other hand, thesis results sections already have their own pictures, so they will be directly taken from thesis.


Do you think this method is OK, or maybe someone has a better one?
You have to cut down brutally. You will have a half hour or so to show the work of a year or more, that is hard.


Explain what this is all about. A short introduction/reminder (depending on your audience!) is probably needed.
State your objectives clearly. One slide for this should be enough.
Summarize your main results. You won't be able to cover everything, but make sure you show enough to cover the stated objectives. Perhaps highlight some tricky point, or a neat technique.
Summarize your objectives again, explaining how they were met.
If pertinent, point out possible future fruitful work building on your thesis
It might be useful to have a slide with publications resulting from the thesis, both already published or in the works (submitted and waiting for approval).


You might consider having some "spare" slides with more details, on which you can fall back when asked to elaborate.