This is an updated version of a handout for a presentation I gave on October 15th, 2003, to help people learn how to use Condor-G effectively. This presentation was my first experiment in avoiding the use of PowerPoint for public speaking. I was given 15 minutes to talk on a topic that I could spend hours talking about. What is the best way to do that? I developed a booklet that I could walk through, touching on the highlights. After the talk, people could read the details at their leisure. This turned out to be a very effective presentation, and I gave it more than once.
When I have time, I try to avoid using PowerPoint to give presentations. While good presentations can be done in PowerPoint, it is also easy too easy to give superficial presentations that people do not find useful or engaging. Doing this presentation taught me why so many presentations are given with PowerPoint: it's easy to use, and it's hard work to develop deep content. By working in another medium, I usually am able to develop a more interesting presentation. However, it also takes significantly more time--a luxury I do not always have.
Note the the document has numbers for each of its numerous figures. These are used during a spoken presentation in order to guide people to the right part of the document. This document has a nice feature that most PowerPoint presentations don't have: it can be used as a read-along guide during a spoken presentation, or it can be read by itself and it is useful in both instances. I find that this is often difficult to achieve in a PowerPoint presentation.
You can downlaod this presentation in
either PDF of Microsoft Word format. Beware: this document is meant
to be printed on a duplex printer (flip short side, not long side) and
folded in half to make a booklet. If you look at the document in
Microsoft Word, the pages will be in order. If you look at in PDF, the
pages will appear to be out of order until you print it and fold it.
MS Word
PDF