Slide Technology

The first question is often slide technology. Is Powerpoint ok? Google Slides? Keynote? I’m here to tell you it doesn’t matter. I’ve tried them all, and it really doesn’t matter. Whatever helps you tell the story better, use that. Don’t let anyone tell you PowerPoint is naff. If you can tell the story you want with PowerPoint, tell it with PowerPoint.

Two warnings, though.

Firstly, watch out for making it too whizzy. I used to use Prezi, which had this cool trick where it zoomed between things on an infinite canvas. I did a couple of talks with it and realised the only question I got at the end was, “How did you make the slides?” If the slides become the point of your talk, that’s not what you want, that’s not your story. I wasn’t there to talk about slide technology. You don’t want the thing people focus on to be the tooling.

Secondly, LLM tools will write slide decks for you and you shouldn’t let them.. A couple of reasons. The first one is, generating the entire deck with an LLM means that it’s no longer your story, it’s the LLMs story. The second one is that LLMs tend to make very whizzy-looking slides, lots of animations, little boxes, all of that, which again pulls attention away from what’s meant to be happening (people listening to the speaker) toward “ooh, look at the cool thing.”

So, general rule: not “never use LLMs,” just be conscious they might not be the best option, and definitely don’t let it write the words on your slides, because your story is what belongs there, not an LLM’s.