You will be able to decide what goes on slides, in speaker notes and in a separate document.
A colleague emails you a deck from a meeting you missed. You open it and can follow every slide. Full paragraphs, detailed tables, footnotes, the reasoning spelled out. You do not need to have been there at all. Then you remember the meeting itself, which you heard about: forty minutes of the presenter reading those paragraphs to the room.
That deck was trying to be two things at once. It was a document meant to be read, and a set of slides meant to support a speaker. It managed the first and failed at the second. This lesson is about keeping the two apart.
Here is a quick test. If someone could read your slides on their own and understand everything, without hearing you speak, the deck is a document. That is not wrong in itself. Plenty of decks are written to be read, sent round and filed. They are just poor slides for a live talk.
When you present a document-style deck, you have two bad options. You can read it aloud, which loses the room for the reasons in lesson 4.1, One idea per slide, stated in the headline. Or you can talk about something else while the audience reads, which splits their attention and usually loses them anyway.
Slides for a talk should be incomplete without you. The headline states the point, the body shows the evidence, and you supply the explanation, the example and the link to the next idea.
The detail does not disappear. It moves to a document built for reading: a handout, a short report, or a follow-up email with attachments. That is where tables, full references, methods, assumptions and the extra examples belong.
Decide whether to send it before or after the talk. Send it before if the audience needs to come prepared, for example when you are asking for a decision and they will want to check the numbers. Send it after if you want their attention on you during the talk, or if the detail would distract them from your main point.
Wei Ling sent her handout two days before the management meeting. It was two pages: the pilot design, the full cost comparison and the training records behind her figures. In the meeting, when the finance head asked about licence costs, she said, "That's on page two of the note I sent on Monday," and moved on. The slides stayed light because the detail had a home.
Many speakers put prompts on their slides because they are afraid of forgetting what to say. The audience then sees a slide full of reminders that were never meant for them.
Most presentation software, including PowerPoint, Keynote and Google Slides, has a speaker notes field under each slide. Use it for your prompts: the example you want to mention, the number to round, the signpost to the next point, the story placeholder from your outline. In presenter view, you see the notes on your screen while the audience sees only the slide.
Keep notes short, as prompts rather than a script. A note such as "Monday chart: say almost twice, name booking system as source, then patient story" is easier to glance at than a paragraph you will be tempted to read. If you are presenting without a second screen, print the notes or keep them on a card. Lesson 8.3, Share your screen without the usual mess, covers presenter view on calls.
For some meetings, the best deck is no deck at all. When a group needs to understand a complicated proposal and make a decision together, a short written memo can work better than slides. People read it at the start of the meeting or beforehand, then spend the time discussing it rather than watching a presentation.
This suits decisions with many moving parts, such as a budget trade-off or a policy change with exceptions, where a slide would oversimplify and a talk would run long. It suits less well when you need to persuade a room that has not yet agreed there is a problem, or when the audience is large.
If you took Communicate at work, the pyramid structure from lesson 1.2, Build longer messages as a pyramid: point, reasons, detail, is a good way to write that memo. Put the recommendation first, then the reasons, then the detail.
Arjun considered a memo for the clinic managers but chose slides, because most of them had not seen the missed appointments data before and the Monday chart did more persuading than any paragraph could. For the follow-up meeting a month later, when the managers had to agree the details of the trial, he wrote a one-page memo instead.
When you split an existing deck, go slide by slide. Keep the headline and the single strongest piece of evidence on the slide. Move the rest of the text into the handout under the same headline, so the two documents follow the same order. Move your prompts into the speaker notes. Anything left over is probably not needed in either.
Your activity is to take a text-heavy deck of your own and split it this way, into a lighter deck for presenting and a one-page handout for reading.
Split one of your text-heavy decks into a lighter presentation deck and a one-page written handout.
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