Just finished reading the book ‘Presentation Zen’ by Garr Reynolds.
Its a really good book if you want to do an actual presentation, when you are the speaker on a podium and everyone else is listening.
The concepts in this book revolve strongly around keeping the ‘deck’ as simple as possible with heavy use of images, etc. The author also suggests that instead of adding more details on the presentation, there should be a separate handout.
This approach makes sense for one-way presentations to a large group of people, and there are some really good points made.
I find that this approach is not very useful while presentating to a smaller group of people whome you are more involved with, like a product review with the team. Such presentations involve a lot of discussion, and its good to have all the data cleanly presented. There are lots of charts and tables (though, less bullet points), which does not blend well with the style in this book. People also expect to be able to just ‘read’ the deck and understand the key messages.
There needs to be a balance between keeping the deck at a high level vs adding details. It needs to have enough details that people can recall the presentation by looking at the deck, but not so much that it overwhelms them.