What if handouts aren’t practical?

This has been mentioned in at least one other thread here on Ask E.T. and I offer it here: try Adobe Acrobat. It’s easy to use, even more ubiquitous than PowerPoint yet doesn’t come with all the PowerPoint baggage. You prepare your image/page entirely in another program; you may already be using Illustrator, Quark, InDesign or Photoshop to prepare images for PowerPoint and can continue to use these or any other program. You export them into Acrobat via its own distilling utility or through a postscript print routine. You can then use Acrobat or the free Adobe Reader to view them and to drive your presentation and you can view and project the resulting pages in Full Screen mode. I’ve found the resulting pages to be extremely accurate in terms of color and detail, and type is handled beautifully. It’s a reasonably good way to project photographic slides digitally and removes most issues of resolution and detail from the presentation software. The clarity of the presentated image is now more dependent on other factors: input from a scanner or camera, layout and image handling software and output through a projector, screen, lighting etc.

I think the other answers have missed the boat. I agree that Acrobat is a useful alternative to Powerpoint but the original question was what to do when the audience is too numerous to use handouts.

I think this is a good question and like any good questions it draws out a multifaceted answer.

First, one must question the utility of seminars with extremely large audiences. I have been at many conferences where the audience size was near 1000 people. At this size interaction between speaker and audience becomes difficult, the projection size and brightness requirements exceed the capability of ordinary slide projectors and slides (too much heat, the slides melt) and lower resolution digital projection techniques forced on the speaker, the ambient noise makes hearing even an amplified speaker difficult and last but not least the speaker appears as a tiny figure in the distance while the talk is proceeding (Conference organisers should include splitscreen techniques to show the ‘slide’ and/or the speaker on the screens). In my opinion this size of audience reduces the seminar to a showpiece or advertisement for the conference and is in part responsible for the `voiceover’ style of presentation.

Given that a large audience seminar is required for various reasons, is a handout really too time-consuming or expensive? This is unlikely. It does take time to produce a handout but audience size has little impact here beyond the time required to physically print the handout. I have printed 200 sorted and stapled 4-leaf 8 page handouts in about 15 minutes using a high speed copier. It took me two days to write the handout, so production time is a small praction of the total time. However, distribution of a handout can take up important time. I have seen lectures where the lecturer waited while 200 copies were distributed through the audience. It can take tens of minutes for this to occur, seriously eating into the lecturers time. A better idea is to arrange distribution prior to the lecture (best) or on entering the the lecture room (worst). At a conference you might consider adding teh handout to the conference registration package.

For more than 20-50 copies a photocopier may be too expensive but a printer can make the handout for a few cents for each copy (People don’t consider using a printer often enough). Careful design (not simply reproducing the slides) can reduce the cost significantly. While the cost of printing the handout may be large in absolute terms (perhaps a hundred or so dollars), as a fraction of the cost of preparing for and attending the conference, the cost of a handout is unlikely to be large

Now if physical handouts are truly out, try an electronic one. At the beginning and end of your talk let them know that a pdf file is available for download. At the begining to relieve anyone of the responsibility of making sketches of your slides and at the end to remind them of where to get it.

If you don’t want to provide a handout at all — simply don’t. Concentrate on making the best of a bad lot and tell people the name of the coffee shop/bar you hangout at. In this situation the best you can hope for will be that people will be intrigued by your presentation and hunt you down for more information.

Best of Luck

After an ET course about five years ago, I gave up on ppt completely and have developed a what seems to be a more effective presentation method. I’ve used this in talks to small audiences (a dozen people) and large ones (several hundred). First of all, when preparing to “give a paper” at a scientific meeting, I actually write a paper — not just a bulleted outline of the talk, but the actual narrative that I seek to present. Then I typeset the paper and store it on my personal webpage as a pdf. Prior to the actual presentation at the meeting, I make a short summary of the salient points of my talk and put these into a document that will fit onto a two-sided 3-by-5 card. (I have the cards printed up in some fun color that might hold a connection to the meeting: Bronco orange in Denver, Carolina blue in Chapel Hill, etc.) I also include on the cards my email address and the URL of the paper that I am presenting. The data density of one 3-by-5 card and an 8-point font probably exceeds 3 or 4 ppt slides — a good deal of information can be put onto those little guys.

At the beginning of the talk, I solicit help from a few members of the audience to distribute the 3-by-5 cards. This really takes no time at all but gets a certain buzz generated in the audience. “Ooh! A giveaway!” The cards are small enough that the audience members can slip them into a pocket or purse and not have to worry about losing a large package of printed material. They can use the cards to follow along with the general flow of the talk but there isn’t a pile of 8.5″ x 11″ pages of printed to material to distract them from paying attention to me!

This method has a number of advantages that have really helped me:

* My talks are vastly improved because I actually spend time before the meeting thinking through exactly what I want to say.

* The stored pdf allows the audience to know exactly what I meant to say even if my words may have gotten slightly twisted in the actual verbal presentation.

* Since there are no words or sentence fragments up on the wall, the audience pays attention better. (This might lead to better comprehension but I haven’t tested it!)

* If they really want to have documentation of my talk, they run to the web site when they get back home and they can download the paper. The website also contains the other things I have written so it gives them some other propaganda as well.

* While attending other talks at the meeting, I can tell who has been
at my talk by the little colored card protruding from the shirt pocket!

* After the talk is over, I can use the cards as business cards with my contact information or as bookmarks for my kids’ story books.

All in all, I’ve had tremendous response from audiences at these meetings when I use this format.