It's a nice week for show-and-tell, don't you think?

Several of us will be doing a presentation this week at a conference -- always an interesting experience. Why? Because there are so many different styles and theories of presentations, and it's pretty amazing how people get set in their ways.

Maybe you recognize some of them. Maybe you are one of them.

Some of the folks infuse massive amounts of detail into a slideshow, with information substantiated by more data. Their mission is to make a presentation so complete that viewers could walk away with a copy of the presentation and feel confident they've seen and heard everything there is to know about a topic. It's the equivalent of an online, visual, and extremely thorough book.

A second school of thought is focused on workflows -- diagrams and charts detailing exactly how things work, and what needs to happen for the next thing to happen, and how the very first thing happened to begin with. It can be very technical -- but very practical and illuminating -- in outlining theories and next steps.

Third (and I'm sure there are many others) is a bit of a combination of tactics, and it's the one I use. Part of it I attribute to a presentation I saw four or five years ago, given by Guy Kawasaki. He suggested a couple of things -- first of all, the 10/20/30 rule.



What's that all about? If you haven't heard of it before, it says that in a one-hour presentation, you should have a maximum of 10 slides, the presentation itself should run for only 20 minutes, and all slides should have text that's at least 30 points in size.

Ten slides (which you can even announce in advance, if you want to show off) sets expectations for the audience, and even if they hate your presentation, they'll stick with you because they can count down to the end.

Twenty minutes is an attempt to bow to reality. To explain, in an hour presentation, you can expect to spend (waste) time getting set up, and getting everybody to settle down. Then, you should have time for questions, and then you start packing up, to make room for the next presenter.

Thirty-point type (minimum size) accomplishes two things -- it takes care of the problem of people squinting to read everything on the slide, and also forces you to be frugal with the amount of info placed on each one.

Now, what about the presentation itself? Heavy use of graphics and light use of text is another way to go. That forces the audience to listen to you, rather than focusing on reading the slide (i.e., reading along with you reading the slide). If you know your material well, this can be a really effective and dramatic way to go.

So my presentation? It'll follow the third pattern. It's only a half hour time slot, so I'm doing four slides and a link to a website. If I can get people to talk back to me, rather than my talking to them for the entire time, I'll be thrilled.

What's your favorite presentation style? And what's your favorite presentation story?