Why do we need presentation slides?

I never seem to find a good way to create slides for presentations. I struggle with both the process and the outcome. Should I start by creating the slides, or by writing script for what I want to say—and then do the slides? Or do I make an outline for what I want to talk about, then the slides, and then write down the script? Skip the script, and only do slides? Or the other way around?

And for the slides themselves: How much text is too much, and how complex can my charts and diagrams be? How important is it to have beautiful slides? Sometimes I have time to visually polish the slides, but mostly I'm too busy for it.

Don't get me wrong—I have done many talks where I'm happy with the final outcome. I'm just dissatisfied with the process leading up to it. One issue is that I spend too much time messing around with the slides themselves, trying to find the best combination of text and figures. Usually I give up fairly early in the process, throw in some figures, and spend most of my attention on the words I want to say while hoping my ugly slides won't throw people off.

The last few weeks I've been wondering why we are so obsessed with making slides at all. What happened to just talking? Aren't people able to focus anymore without slides? Or are presentations with slides generally better than ones without? Often there are obvious reasons for why you need slides, for example to show a data chart, but nowadays it seems like people need to have a slide to accompany everything you say. In a culture obsessed with PowerPoints and bullet points, can I get away with only showing the minimum set of graphs I need for a presentation, and let the rest of the talk only consist of...well, talking? Do I dare let the screen be blank?

The use of slide animations is another common practice, and I'm not talking about fancy animations; I simply mean the feature of revealing content sequentially in a slide. If a slide contains a large amount of information, I'm convinced that revealing a slide's content piece by piece is better than showing everything at once, especially if I'm showing bullet points or walking through a complex diagram. Presenting too much information at once draws the focus away from what you're actually saying. But maybe the need for many animations really is a sign that there's too much content in that slide?

I have never been a fan of PowerPoint, because it is both bloated and proprietary software. I often make diagrams in Drawio, then export them into my PowerPoint slides. This gets cumbersome when I have many figures, and I need to do frequent updates and edits of them. I had the idea of simply using Drawio directly for presenting slides, and in only a few minutes I had created a reusable slide template, using a Drawio-file with multiple pages, with the styling theme of my workplace. I thought I had found my one true solution for slides—no more exporting and copy-pasting diagrams between applications!—until I realized that I can't easily do animations or partial reveals of a slide. You can do animations in Drawio, but you cannot control the timing and reveal with the mouse/keyboard.

I explored a few hacks to make it work, for example by using layers or multiple copies of a slide where content appeared sequentially, but none of the solutions were good enough to make it worth using Drawio for slides. I don't know if it says more about me or the state of digital technology that I spent a significant amount if time trying to make Drawio behave like PowerPoint. Software is supposed go make things smooth, fast and easy, but it has a tendency to create new points of friction in places that didn't even exist before. Whether it is the software or humans who create the friction depends on your point of view, I guess...

Anyway, all of this made me think about whether we even use slides in the right way. Edward Tufte is a known critic of PowerPoint:

The standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.

He has also written:

Presentations largely stand or fall on the quality, relevance, and integrity of the content. If your numbers are boring, then you've got the wrong numbers. If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won't make them relevant. Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure.

Reading that the ubiquitous PowerPoint-format is detrimental makes me happy, because I dislike making those kinds of slides. I'm on board with most of what he says, but reading his critique of PowerPoint makes me think that he is criticising something that's not so common anymore, for example the words and images that "dance in color" and the fancy decorations. Also, I'm so used to the standard PowerPoint-based presentations that it's difficult to know what to do instead. In a couple of instances I've held talks without any slides at all, and it both felt good and worked well. But the situation is different when, for example, you need to present something in an online meeting. It's like everyone needs something to look at in order to follow along.

Maybe I'm just trying to get away having to make slides at all. It often feels like an unnecessary burden, something that is expected more than it's needed. Perhaps a strategy could be to rather focus on making high quality diagrams and figures that can can be honed over time and reused, rather than writing sets of bullet points from scratch every time. It's tempting to say that if you are knowledgeable about your topic, and have a clear idea of what you want to say, it doesn't matter exactly which tools you use for presenting them. However, honing the workflow for creating (or not creating) slides can be a real time-saver.

After writing down my thoughts on this, it becomes clear that it's possible to overthink the process of preparing presentations. Advice can be found in abundance online, and the "right" method depends on the setting, the audience and the role of the presenter. In any case, I'll experiment with relying less on slides, reducing the amount of them, and place more focus on high quality and relevant content.