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Goochland’s Innovation Team

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The Slides Aren’t the Presentation*

  • Yet everyone always refers to the PowerPoint or Keynote or Google Slides files as “the presentation.”

Several years ago, when I presented at NECC (the former name of the ISTE Conference), I wanted to produce a really compelling handout for my talk. I created a template in Adobe InDesign and then also used the same graphical language in my slides. I can’t be sure of the result, but my idea was to use simple, clean slides, and put all the details into the PDF document I shared online.

John's first SlideDoc from 2009

This document allowed me to write things out instead of having to use busy, text-crowded slides. But the software I used is expensive and probably is overkill for the job.

When I read Resonate by Nancy Duarte, I was curious about her idea for something she called SlideDocs. And having made a hundred or more slide decks in my professional life, I knew that clean slides that didn’t compete for the audience’s attention were best. I wanted to re-explore this idea, of producing a secondary document that worked better as the accompanying medium for a presentation.

As I read Nancy’s website, and downloaded and played with her SlideDoc templates, I wasn’t necessarily happy with using Keynote (or PowerPoint) as a tool for laying out text. So I switched things up and created my own Pages template.

Accessible below, I have created a video on how to create your own template within Pages and have also linked to the file I used. Please note that the fonts I used are not standard, so you can replace Eras and Adobe Jenson with those that you like.