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  • The Advantages of a 2,500 Slide PowerPoint Deck

    By Joshua Kim August 24, 2010 9:00 pm EDT

    I saw a great presentation today (on the brain and learning) where the speaker made wonderful use of PowerPoint.

    Some of the things the speaker did with his PowerPoint included:

    • Seamlessly jumping across his deck in response to questions. For instance, if someone asked about long term vs. short term memory, the speaker was able to jump to a slide or set of slides with data, graphics, or text related to the question. He never said, "I'll get to that question in a little while." Instead, he reinforced the question (and the questioner) by adapting his presentation, and the slide(s) being shown, on the fly.
    • The slides had no extraneous words or materials on them. No branding or institutional affiliation. No excess graphics, and and a minimum of text. We all know that when it comes to slides that less is more, but we forget that the templates we use often contain distracting information.
    • When jumping to a slide to answer a question or respond to a point, the presenter showed a blank screen. We never had to look at extraneous slides or materials that did not relate to the current discussion or question.
    • The presenter did not rush through slides towards the end of his talk to finish up on time. Rather, he was able to jump to his concluding slides at the point where the time for the talk was ending.

    Good PowerPoint is so rare that I went up after the talk and asked him how he does it. Some of his answers surprised me.

    His slide deck contains over 2,500 slides. Rather than editing slides or re-doing his talk each time, he simply adds new slides on to the end. It would seem that a 2,500 slide PowerPoint deck would be unwieldy, but the presenter showed me the outline he uses that has slide title and number. By typing slide number and hitting "return" PowerPoint jumps to the correct slide. As long as the outline groups the slides by category it becomes possible to find the correct slide and jump to it in response to the discussion.

    I've never tried this methodology, but I think I might. If I basically had one big slide deck for each course, or each presentation topic, I'd get to know that deck very well. Slides could be added as I learned new things, rather than waiting to make the presentation or lecture prior to delivery. Building presentations could become part of the knowledge consolidation process, separated to the "performance" (lecture) piece, but ready to go when needed. Perhaps living with a slide deck over time would make it easier to give presentations in a non-linear manner, breaking down the barrier to communication that PowerPoint so often puts up.

    Have any of you tried the giant slide deck, jump around, non-linear PowerPoint approach? Does this sound like a viable presentation technique, or did I just witness an idiosyncratic method that does not make sense to diffuse?

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Comments on The Advantages of a 2,500 Slide PowerPoint Deck

  • What's the Size of That File Josh?
  • Posted by StevenB on August 25, 2010 at 8:15am EDT

  • I'm having a little trouble wrapping my head around this mega-PPT file approach Josh. Sounds like you did too at first. I think this might work if you tend to present on pretty much the same topic all the time or perhaps minor variations on the topic. But if you constantly take on new topics for your presentations (and that might not be the case of a faculty member teaching the same course content over multiple semesters), this technique probably wouldn't work. In a sense, this presenter is building a database of slides on the topic. Each time he encounters a new research study he can create a slide (or two) with a few bits of data or points about that research. Then he can pull that up whenever it's needed to make a point. So is this technique really all that different from having some sort of web-based data repository when you can quickly bring up a piece of content when it's needed?

    All that aside, sounds like you had a pretty good presentation experience - maybe part of it was just the difference it offered from more contemporary presentation styles. Now, would a Prezi have made it even better? (See http://bit.ly/dqo7fd )

  • the Mother of all decks
  • Posted by ken long , Dept of Logistics & Resource Operations at US Armyt Command & General Staff college on August 25, 2010 at 9:30am EDT

  • I use this exact technique when teaching Army Change Management and Army Sustainment

    I have over 500 slides that illustrate certain points, many of which are cleaned up versions of story-boarding explanations I have used to clarify various issues over the years. I save them all by group/theme in 1 large file, and i can call them up as needed to help visualize etc. Many of the little speeches associated with them I have produced as short YouTube style narratives using the slide as the visual and make them available to students. It is very freeing; i can call up support slides immediately and i always have the complete resource for any presentation, which lets the conversation go where it naturally wants to and i can act as a guide.

    In my private business as an equity trader and educator for stock traders i use the same technique and i have several thousands concept and practice case study slides that are in my master deck or stoired as image files with a file naming nomenclature that allows for instant retrieval: not 1 PPT file but the same concept

    i can also build subsets for particular audiences/themes lessons from the master.

    bottom line: i always have 1 master file that contains EVERY interesting slide i have ever made

    Size: less of an issue with Terabyte HDs but my 500 slide deck comes in at 40M: judicious use of graphics and .png image format

    if interested in more discussion contact me at long-kenneth@conus.army.mil

  • Posted by Jonathan Dresner on August 25, 2010 at 9:45am EDT

  • I don't use PP much, but I do use art. I've amassed quite a collection from museums and scanned books (not on the web, for obvious reasons), and while I don't carry an outline with me, I do have the images labelled well enough, and I know them well enough, that I can find them pretty quickly if I need to.

  • Posted by Gil B at powerpointguru.com on August 25, 2010 at 2:45pm EDT

  • I have worked with several presenters and passed along that same tip of selecting the slide number and hitting return. However there is a better way with big presentations. You can create a menu bar that appears at the side or bottom of each slide like you would see on a web page and that bar has hyperlinks that let the presenters quickly jump around the presentation without having to look at notes. Lots of presenters move around the room and with navigation available directly on the slide it makes it easier to move around the presentation.

  • PowerPoint as a multimedia dashboard
  • Posted by Suzanne Aurilio , pICT at SDSU on August 25, 2010 at 4:00pm EDT

  • I approach Powerpoint as if it were a multimedia dashboard. It's a container too, in that it can "hold" organize and display an array of media and content. One example is using custom animation and Kens Burns' effects, with audio narration or music to produce elegant and interesting "presentations."

  • Posted by Cameron , eLearning & Ed Design Manager at Monash Universtiy on August 25, 2010 at 9:30pm EDT

  • I've used Pptplex for nonlinear presentations. It a free PowerPoint addon. It's more like a poster that you can zoom in and out of. Unfortunately animations don't work.

    In a past role I had a bank of 80 slides. I was involved in a support role for a large state eLearning project. I had a standard presentation of about 10 slides, but at the start of sessions I would ask people what they were interested in then I would open the slide sorter and move slides up to follow the first 10 slide block. I let them see the process and explained it as I went, providing some suggestions of when they might do this in class.

    I had another collection of slides that covered a range of projects and support strategies. I put some default navigation buttons into the master template and created a content page so I could bounce back and forth to different sections in response to different questions.

  • The best way to set up flexible presentations
  • Posted by Steve Hards , Publisher, Opazity Add-in at SteveHardSoft on August 26, 2010 at 4:15am EDT

  • All the above approaches give the audience and presenter a much better experience than the usual linear presentation and Gil B's approach is the easiest to manage for most people as it doesn't place too many demands on the deck owner's memory. However, you can run into practical problems with the hyperlinks. I've discovered that Robert Lane has all those covered in his Relational Presentation approach. If you want to see the master of this at work watch the demo videos from the home page of his website http://www.aspirecommunications.com/ .

    On the matter of large file sizes, is no one using one of the excellent PowerPoint optimization programs like NXPowerLite?

  • Non-linear PowerPoint: the solution for great presentations
  • Posted by Chantal Bosse , Presentation professional at CHABOS inc. on August 27, 2010 at 12:15pm EDT

  • I haven't tried the giant slide deck solution. I don't think I would feel comfortable focusing on what slide number to hit instead of my audience. But I have been using the Relational Presentation approach for a few years now and it works very well!

    As Steve mentioned, hyperlinking can bring practical problems but only when we are not aware of its limits. I have a medical equipment client that uses this method to make sure his reps can easily access all of their corporate sales material on the fly. They are thrilled with the results.

    Regarding file size I usually control it two ways: if I have time I reduce image sizes and resolution to the minimum required by PowerPoint, if time is a big issue I use NXPowerLite to optimize my final file. Tip: I suggest not running any optimization tool more than once because it might blur some photos...

  • Greater PowerPoint Agilyt
  • Posted by Mathew , Student on August 28, 2010 at 7:00am EDT

  • Interesting although 2500 slides seems too many to be effective when delivering an interactive presentation. I saw this yesterday for a new PowerPoint Add-in on Indezine's blog http://blog.indezine.com/2010/08/slidedynamic-conversation-with-tim.html. It seem to be really fast at producing an interactive navigation panel in PowerPoint with flash: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90tyKVJRzYk

  • Who was the presenter?
  • Posted by Michael , eLearning Technology Support Specialist at Cuyahoga Community College on August 31, 2010 at 8:15am EDT

  • Joshua,

    I'd be very curious to find out who the presenter was, and if there's a video/Slideshare of at least a portion of their presentation available. Any word?

    I personally feel you should use as many slides as you need. A typical hour-long preso for me has over 160 slides (a new slide around every 20 seconds if you average it out).

    Keynote (and I suppose PowerPoint) are such incredible mediums when they're used correctly. It's all about aspect ratio: If slides were meant to be read, they'd have the same aspect ratio of a book. Instead they look like TVs, a visual medium. </soapbox>

  • choose-your-path information literacy instruction
  • Posted by Anne Marie Gruber , Asst. Director for Library Instruction & Public Services at University of Dubuque on August 31, 2010 at 9:45pm EDT

  • Librarians at University of Dubuque have been using non-linear PowerPoint, partnered with "clickers" for several years to teach research skills. Paul Waelchli, now at St. Norbert, started this method and we have adapted it in several other contexts with positive student responses. Here is a blog post from him about it: http://researchquest.blogspot.com/2008/02/library-dusk-choose-your-own-adventure.html

    We are now working with Prezi software to do other non-linear information literacy sessions. Students respond well to both the visual and the conceptual--research and life are not linear! :)

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