The lack of usable content without the presenter is my only complaint with the training that PTC provides to presenters.
Don't get me wrong, the training is great!, and I believe it's really raised the level of the presentations since they started doing it. This is an added benefit of PTC taking over the conference.
But one of the points in the training is to pare down the content on the slides so you don't overwhelm the viewer with too much data while you're talking. Also they essentially say the slide are not supposed to be a training manual, they should require you to speak with them. They don't need to stand alone.
The problem is, when you take those slides without the presenter notes, you miss a lot, ... sometime to the point of being useless.
Being in the engineering field, I'm pretty sure most of us want at least enough detail so we can either follow along step by step, or figure out where to find additional information on the topic.
The way I approach my presentations is I'm creating documentation for myself and others in my company. I want this presentation to pretty much stand alone and be a reference document.
I've won three best presenter awards, so I'm pretty sure most of the attendees like the detail I put into my talks.
The way I strike that balance of not overwhelming the audience is to only show one bullet point at a time on each slide. I don't use the animation capability in Powerpoint to do that. I duplicate the slides. More work, but it translates to my iPad better. For example my attendee copy of the presentation is 48 slides, my presenter copy is 130 slides.
One other problem, after downloading the zip file and looking at my own presentation (CUST301), I see that it's not the last version I uploaded, and it was reformatted to put two slides on each page. The original pdf I had uploaded, included my speaker notes in the upper left corner of each slide. When you mouse over it you can see what I intended to say on that slide. That missing from this version.
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I'm happy to email anyone a copy of my presentation.
David Haigh
