It was ok. A lot of fluff and lofty statements, as opposed to practical advice (which you'll find, but not enough for my taste). Frankly, the best book on this topic, in my opinion, is still Jonathan Schwabish's Better Presentations. ( )

Read Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds first. I hate to complain about a lot of good detail, but there is just too much in this book. Unless, of course, you are a professor teaching a "presentation" class and need a good book to rest your materials on.

There are few people in my life that enjoy putting together a good presentation as much as I, and I thought this would be a great read and fit for my interests. But in the end, it was too long, too technical, and too comprehensive.

Also, small nit: the font was too small to read on a bus (and I have great eyes and have never needed glasses). ( )

It's a must-read book for anybody who makes presentations on which a lot of things depend. And if you don't do them now, it is very likely that you will at one point of your life.

This book takes great and terrible slides apart and shows you, piecewise, what makes a good presentation and what sets it adrift.

Make your slides great again (what a retarded joke haha)! ( )

There is nothing wrong with presentation software. How else do you present a sophisticated graph, map, chart or table? Are we all really going to do a Bill Bryson and offer an entirely oral presentation of the universe to cover cross sections, plan views, 3D geometry, and complex mathematical proofs? You must all be fucking stupid and have an extremely narrow range of things to discuss or present if you never need a diagram. Bill Bryson does a good job, but it isn't Einstein and it isn't Bertrand Russell.

I can remember Les Fishman jumping up and down with excitement in front of a graph of the Japanese growth rate presenting to 300 students (OK it was a long time ago). He did not have modern presentation software but he was projecting it onto a screen, the then contemporary equivalent. What else was he supposed to do, carry it round on rolls of wall paper?

What is even more irksome and frustrating than the pinheads who load the entire text of their presentation into the software and then read it out is the dirt brains who trot out the same dreary linear lectures and proofs year after year, scrawled on a whiteboard in illegible handwriting with their back to the audience which therefore can't hear them properly, but can't be arsed to turn that into a clear presentation. For sequential activities like mathematical proofs, presentation software is ideal. It is in its element with step by step processes and the explanation thereof.

Ideally, each PowerPoint slide should consist of one interesting and simple graphic or slide and then the speaker should talk around the subject for a while. Two difficulties arose in my field (Physics) back in the day:

1. People whose first language was not English may not understand much of what the speaker says so people try to put more information on the slides. This often lead to the trauma of having to sit through "PowerPoint karaoke".

2. Conferences often print the slides afterwards as a reference. This means people try to tell the whole story on the slides.

Both these things make for cluttered slides and confused presentations. My solution would be to make speaker provide separate notes for the audience so that they can keep their slides simple, but still provide extra material for those who want/need it. The only problem with this, of course, is that it makes more work for the speaker. ( )

Slide:ologie est un livre aussi beau qu'instructif, aussi inspirant que pratique. Si vous lisez ce livre et profitez des leçons précieuses qu'il propose, vous concevrez e ferez des presentations remarquables dont on se souviendra.