Comments on: Creating slides for technical presentations

By: Sacred Cow #5: If the Audience Is Technical, They Want To See Detailed Diagrams - Thoughts On Presenting And Design

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 16:11:39 +0000

[...] suffering. This parasitic bovine is present everywhere you have technical people. Fortunately, there are treatments for this affliction if you know where to look. This is a sacred cow that must die else the brain [...]

By: Simon - Presentation skills training, UK

Simon - Presentation skills training, UK — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 11:10:15 +0000

On this theme, I was working with a senior manager of the NHS who deals with statistical presentations on a daily basis. She commented that technical presentations as she understood them (that is, presenting figures on change and so on) are actually amongst the easies to present….

Statistics are designed to illustrate trends and patterns. If you think of those ideas as ‘stories’ in the data you’ve got your presentation susses. What’s more, statistical trends in intrinsically visual – nothing’s more visual than a graph!

Simon

By: M.J. Plebon

M.J. Plebon — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 02:51:53 +0000

I am very anxious to see what your research unfolds in the area of technical presentations. Having written and presented several technical papers for the oil and gas sector, you need to decide if the chart or graph is needed in your message and if it is, what is it to say to your audience?

From my experience, the technical presentation often involves data in various formats. Often only one or two key pieces of data are relevant to the message however the slide contains reams of informatoin. The challenge is to direct your audience’s attention on the key data and prevent them from scanning the irrelevant information. Subtle animation often helps.

Best of luck in your research.

M.J.

By: Life After PowerPoint! » Blog Archive » PowerPoint slides for technical presentations

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 18:36:24 +0000

[...] Creating slides for technical presentations [...]

By: Simon - Presentation skills training, UK

Simon - Presentation skills training, UK — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 21:45:38 +0000

You raise a very good point. In a lot of ways I’d say the principles of technical presentations are the same as any other kind of presentation (in that your audience need to be the centre of what you say etc.) but there are some pretty significant differences, too.

I’m not saying I’ve got the definitive answer – or even anything like it! – but I started thinking about this in my blog a while ago: http://www.curved-vision.co.uk/presentation-skills-blog/2008/10/22/presentations-vs-public-speaking

Maybe a little online conversation is in order…

I love your suggestion that we only use slides in our presentations when we’d use them in a conversation. Brilliant point and (like most brilliant things) so elegantly simple!

Simon

By: Tracy Frey

Tracy Frey — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 18:52:35 +0000

Hi Andrew,

This is a great and much needed post. It has been so wonderful to see the influx of good design principles into presentations (not a moment too soon!), but those principles can be awfully hard to translate into a more technical presentation. One of the things I often notice in more technical presentations is that it can be the tendency of the presenter to believe that more complex visuals = more valid challenge or solution. It reminds me of when we all used to “compete” for who had the most homework in high school (am I alone in that??), where really the prize should be the other way around… Learning to pare it down to the absolute bare minimum is a discipline, and an excellent one to hone.

I will definitely blast this out to the SlideRocket community, who I am sure will appreciate it.

Take care,
Tracy
http://www.sliderocket.com