PowerPoint detail/font size - have things changed?

[presenterz]

Back in the day I was taught to put 3-5 short points on a slide. But recently I keep seeing really busy slides, with small text and detailed diagrams.
Is this still bad form? Or has convention changed now everyone is on Teams on big screens not looking across a room at a small one? Are we expecting them to read like it's a Word document now?

I'm doing one for an online interview and would normally keep slides simple and talk around them, but don't want to come across old-fashioned/inept/lazy!

It's funny but I have noticed this too. I'm old and remember when powerpoint was new so that everyone needed training. In training sessions there was an emphasis on font size and rules about minimising quanitities of text and even making sure there were not too many slides in the first place in order to avoid 'death by powerpoint'.

Recently I have been writing a new course based on other lecturer's slides (they shared with me!) and none of them follow these 'rules'. They are all younger than me and I wonder if they are of an age where when they were at school it was no longer deemed necessary to give design guidance anymore as it had become something so commonplace.

I think powerpoint training should make a come back.

Oh no. I'm officially retro! Thank you for confirming. Maybe I should post on schools and ask what teachers do these days. Not that the job I'm applying for is anything to do with a school, but I guess that is where expectations/standards get set for most people.
Horrible feeling I'm going to have to do a lot more work now.

It depends what the slides are for. If they are to help people follow what you are saying then the 'old' rules apply. However people are now using PowerPoint to replace handouts or reports that would have gone in Word before so they can be used for presenting, and as a record.

Definitely 3-5 points and talk around the subject. Anyone can make a PowerPoint presentation, but very few can produce a professional and effective PowerPoint presentation.

It depends on their use. If it's for a presentation, then yes, less is better but I generally use PowerPoint for everything so write reports and long form documents in it too. Sometimes those end up getting presented or shared on screen but I wouldn't design it for that.

@Stanleyville

It depends what the slides are for. If they are to help people follow what you are saying then the 'old' rules apply. However people are now using PowerPoint to replace handouts or reports that would have gone in Word before so they can be used for presenting, and as a record.

This, definitely

I review PowerPoint slides for work later. They are much more useful if they detailed rather than 3-4 bullet points with a few key words.

I do think it's also a zoom thing and having the time to peer at them.

Agree that the purpose of Powerpoints have changed a lot - it's not just for presenting now; it's usually a handout afterwards, and a few words doesn't really help then.

Ah yes that is so true that people are using powerpoint as a written record now, rather than printing out handouts. I think that is what has happened at my uni. Lecturers are saving the powerpoints on the college intranet for students to access and make their own notes on them and are also avoiding printing like they used to so their slides need to contain much more info than when they were not much more than cues for the presenter.

This is a generalisation but I’m a lecturer and I’ve noticed my older colleagues tend to give a handout and shorter slides, but younger ones only do slides with all the information needed. All my students download and annotate the slides during the lecture so they don’t have to read it off the front unless they want to and if it’s online it’s easier to see anyway.

I prefer detailed slides but that’s just a personal preference.

Back in my day, you'd stick to the 3-5 points per slide, but add extra text in the notes section if they were also going to be handed out?

At my previous company, we were always told to avoid putting anything in the Notes section. I think this was mainly because people were very lazy at re-using slide decks and they often wouldn't check the notes section so you'd end up with information in there that shouldn't be in there. Less of an issue if it's a general presentation but not great if it's a client or sensitive document!

@mynameiscalypso,
interesting - I was a project manager, and the notes section could be very different depending on the audience!

I do remember some advice from an ex-military person about presentations:

1. Tell them what you're going to tell them.
2. Tell them.
3. Tell them what you told them.

I found that useful, especially if you were an agenda item in a busy meeting, hopefully some of them would recall what I said.

Thanks everyone that's useful, so it really depends on the purpose. So for an interview presentation where I'm aiming to make a personal impression rather than communicate a large amount of information, hopefully I can stick with the brief bullets to talk around approach. That's a relief.

Good luck @presenterz I was actually going to say the last PowerPoint I had to do was a one page!!! Presentation on a really complex topic (the document itself would be typically 1000 pages of written text) for an interview. Absolutely not something I could sum up in 3-5 lines of text so I ended up doing an A4 table. I got the job and they use a lot of slides over teams like others have mentioned which are just as detailed as mine was so I must have pitched it right.

IMO the correct way (I'm really old) is to put a summary on the slide - things that delegates will remember and then the presenter talks around each point.

If there is too much on the slide then the presenter ends up just reading it - that isn't a presentation and is unprofessional. Additionally the delegates sit there reading the slide and not paying attention to what the presenter is saying!

For example I would never put a graph and loads of text, I would put the graph and then a couple of 'prompt' words/phrases.

I do think that perhaps now that computing is 'taught' in schools it's just about how to use the software rather than the process of creating a presentation. Like learning how to use Word but not knowing how to formulate a report/letter etc.