Talking faster is not an answer to time constraints.

I was at a presentation a few weeks ago where the speaker went through about 50 data rich slides in about 35 minutes and finally looked up at the audience and announced, "I'll have to go faster if I'm going to get through all my slides." He did and the entire talk was a waste.

Talking faster is not an answer to time constraints. Nor is it essential that you get through every slide. 24 hours after your talk, and if you're good, the audience might remember your overall message and one or two key slides, but not more. Make sure you haven't gone so fast that they don't even recall that.

Prepare for the presentation by having a strategy in mind for dealing with unexpected time problems. You never know if the presentation will start on time, whether audience questions (which you want!) will change the flow, etc. Come prepared with strategies to short-circuit some of the details while allowing the key message to be transmitted.

Speeding up to meet a time constraint is something that seems to give some satisfaction for the speaker, it works against audience needs.

The narrative supports the slides and the slides support the narrative

Recently a colleague asked me to look over his slides. After reviewing this highly dense set of data and text slides, I told my friend not to "over think" the slides and concentrate on the overall message first. I drafted a couple of paragraphs (in Word, not PowerPoint) summarizing a potential narrative for the presentation.

My friend thought the narrative was helpful but didn't see the connection between the narrative and the data slides. He thought he could summarize the narrative on the first slide and then dive back into all the dense data and text slides. What he failed to see was that the narrative supports the data and the data supports the narrative.

It's fine to summarize the narrative right up front, but the subsequent data should support that narrative. The speaker needs to reveal the connection between the data and the narrative on every slide. The narrative makes each piece of data relevant to a bigger story. The data lends credibility to the narrative. Data that doesn't support the narrative shouldn't be presented.

The "set up" slide, part 2

I want to bring attention back to the "set up" slide. This was the topic of an earlier tip, but every time I help someone with a presentation I'm reminded about the importance of the slide, or at least the logic that goes into the slide. Presenters who have not worked out this logic tend to develop presentations witout clear purpose.

Briefly, the "set up" slide is a slide that comes very early in the presentation (perhaps the first slide). It sets up the over-arching question for the presentation and the logic that motivates that question. As an example, here is a "set up" slide for my talk on how to do presentations.

The patter is as follows. On the proceeding slide (the presentation title slide) I argue that too many speakers develop presentations for themselves rather than thinking through audience information needs and what the audience can comprehend. Te narrative for the above slide is as follows: I will argue in my presentation that slides are inherently difficult to comprehend (bullet 1). I will also argue that scientific information adds to the challenge (bullet 2). I will also argue that most audiences contain listeners of varied expertise and the speaker may not have a good understanding of the range prior to walking in (bullet 3). Given these problems, the overarching question is how to help the audience.

The "set up" slide gives the audience an immediate understanding of what they can expect to learn in this talk. I articulate the overarching question in more detail later in the talk.

Whether or not you use a "set up" slide like the one above, or the one discussed previously, you need to work out an overarching question and a simple logic that motivates it. I would create a "set up" slide even if you decide not to use it in the presentation.