Hi Coders!

What about going to a DebConf without having to prepare your Powerpoint slides, but instead to prepare only what you have to say?

Recently I read a Powerpoint presentation about the relative limited importance of making nice slides, of choosing a nice background, theme,....

To some extends, do we really need any single slide or multi-medias?
- Sorry for the answer, but we do not need this necessarily.
http://okasaki.blogspot.co.at/2008/0...-teaching.html

I believe that it might be a revolution to a world of excess.
Powerpoint and slides aren't the solution for efficient communication.

What do you think?

If prepared and handed-out ahead of time or available for subsequent download as a PDF, slides can be useful to reduce the audience's burden for taking notes. (If they are looking at their notebooks, they are not looking at you.) But I agree that slides should be simple and held to a minimum. For example, I eschew the use of animated transitions.

I worked with one company that had an interesting mantra: in presentations within the company, you had to prepare your hand-out in 12-point Courier, one-and-a-half spaced, with no slideshow allowed. Everyone did it that way. This not only cut down presentation prep time (considerably), but it also put every idea on equal presentational footing. As they said: "Don't put a polish on it. If it shines, it will therefore shine on its own."

But, when making a presentation, I think that a simple and un-adorned set of slides is appropriate. I would also encourage you to only prepare slides with answers, not intermediate slides that ask a question. Slides correspond to your key points (organized in groups), and can be sensibly read later.