Why are slides used in talks instead of document scrolling?

It's incredibly important NEVER to reveal information visually before you get to talking about it. With scrolling, you'll be showing bits of the "next topic/points" at the bottom of the screen (unless you're incredibly careful) and people will be paying attention to that and guessing what comes next rather than paying attention to the discussion. (Don't know why people do, they just do. People are curious and easily distracted.)

Therefore, you need a fixed canvas to flip through, for total control. Hence, fixed slides rather than scrolling.

This is also why when slides have multiple main bullet points, it's very common to only reveal them one bullet at a time. This ensures you have the audience's attention as you discuss each one, and their mind isn't distracted by thinking about the next.

So that's the main reason -- to carefully and precisely control the flow of information, to sync talking/discussion with the visual.

Secondarily, slides lend themselves to attractive layout of images etc. for maximum effect of storytelling and emotional effect. Of course, for a highly technical presentation, that may be irrelevant. But a lot of talks do include a storytelling/emotional aspect where the dramatic framing of a single photo is important, which you need a slide with a fixed layout to do.

Because before digital projectors were a thing we had slide projectors. Much easier to create physical slides and flip through those with a slide projector than create a scroll of film and project that. PowerPoint and other presentation programs were the digital version of slides. For awhile you'd still have physical slides made from your PowerPoint slides. My father did that up to around 2000.

It's also just less fiddly to flip through pages or slides than scroll around.

You've made a key mistake. Slides are made of text and images but use the narrative language of TV and movies. Storytelling (and all slide decks are stories) using the tropes of written language results in terrible powepoints, the timing is all off. Whenever you find yourself in a situation where you have a deck that needs to be a doc you've found yourself in a meeting thay could have been an email.

Slides are meant to illustrate concepts, not be a document you read. If I can read your slides like a cut up article you're doing presentations wrong.

From a physiological standpoint, I don't think document scrolling is of any help when trying to read something. Especially when it's not the reader who does the scrolling.

Scrolling is needed when you have a document that doesn't fit on the screen / inside its window.

Splitting things in chunks is helpful, and can even be helpful if the unit of splitting is dictated by a physical constraint, like page size. It can sometimes be annoying when a flow is broken at an unfavourable position by a page break. But even this kind of uniform splitting provides natural orientation points for the reader to find things previously read or skimmed over. It provides an indexing method for free ("consider the figures on page 14").

It also allows printing on physical media (if wanted).

I guess the main aim of slides is to focus the attention. So, the act of scrolling may have a negative psychological effect on that.

If you are starting with a document, there are apps that directly transform it into slides, like deckset [1] and marp [2] for markdown. I think I've seen similar options directly integrated into obsidian, Notion and others.

[1] https://www.deckset.com/

[2] https://github.com/marp-team/marp

As a lecturers in a uni, I used to deliver all my lectures using slides, (PowerPoint, Beamer or Keynote).

My problem with slides is that my students have a stated preference for knowledge disseminated via simple web pages. So… I switched to simple web pages. They can be a bit clumsy to deliver in a live lecture, but at the end of the day a lecture succeeds or fails by my energy, not the medium.

The advantage of working in this way is that it place me close to web searches, linked material etc. This serves the inevitable extemporaneous diversions I encounter via student questions.

I actually use a scrolling document for most of my talks at work. I do this for a few reasons:

I am lazy. I just want write in Markdown. I have a dynamic HTML renderer so I don't even have to render the document myself. https://github.com/superjamie/emdee

Usually the stuff I write is intended to be consumed either as written or as video. I don't want a bunch of slides with incomplete talking points.

It works for me.

Try scrolling with a remote while giving a talk. Somehow I think the current format will prove good enough.

The focus of a good presentation is the presenter, not what’s on the screen. Bad talks make the audience divide their attention between what is being said and what is being shown. What would be shown on a scrolling display? Probably text. Text requires concentration to read, which means asking the audience to divide their attention.

For what it’s worth, if you want something like a scroll effect, I can think of a couple ways to make it happen in Keynote or PowerPoint.

Scrolling would require the presenter to constantly reference a screen He/She/They may not be able to see.

Pacing and control when the information is revealed.

Good captivating presentations are foremost a spoken medium. You're telling a story. You use the screen as an aid for concepts that are easier to show than to describe, and secondarily as an reinforcement/amplification of the points you're making, and then as a background setting the mood of the talk.

But the visuals have to match what you're talking about. Otherwise they're out of context and distracting by foreshadowing what you're going to talk about next. You also can't emphasise things by making a sudden reveal if the presentation is gently scrolling by itself.

BTW the classic PowerPoint style of long lists of bullet points with the presentation outline is IMHO not good. That's more of an aid for the presenter than the audience.

I treat slides like notecards. They keep me on topic and remind me of what I need to talk about.

Present however works best for your material and audience. Discrete slides, scrolling through documents, or a hybrid. But in my experience, slides tend to be better than scrolling unless you're "working through" some problem (even then, slides tend to be just fine).

It's not like people don't scroll through documents and call it a presentation. They've just been some of the most painful presentations I've attended and I have no desire to subject anyone to that myself. I'd honestly rather have PowerPoint eye charts than another one of them. At least the eye charts tried to create a presentation, they just fucked it up.

Because slides are like scrolling with the scroll cadence determined ahead of time. 'Next slide' is easier to think about while speaking than 'scroll..er..this much'.

There are a ton of post hoc justifications for slides here. Ability to control the audience's rate of uptake of info aside, I think that slides are a cultural norm for presenting info in business presentations that predate computers and were the natural mode for the available early av equipment. Sweating Bullets, a biographical account of the early days of power point, includes some interesting description of what things were like pre-computer.

Slides give speakers more control. But I like using a combination approach, so some of my slides link to a zoomable/scrollable canvass.

I disagree that giving people information visually before you speak about it is bad. It may be a creative and engaging way to present. I like to pose visual mysteries sometimes and use my oratory to reveal the secret.

But I agree that the speaker is putting on a show and must be allowed to control it.

Because of movie transitions from scene to scene leading to slide projectors with transitions from scene (slide) to scene leading to powerpoint-like presentations using digital slides iwth transitions from scene to scene?

People are used to scene transitions going back a long time (maybe even thousands of years in the manner of theatre scenes/transitions). Slides make sense to me in that regard at least.

This is all just a huge, un-researched, wild guess, of course.

I remember a few years ago some more dynamic presentation modes making a bit of a splash. I used one of them[1] to good reception in at least one talk, but ultimately it felt more like really slick slide-to-slide transitions than a fundamentally different paradigm.

[1] https://impress.js.org/

I knew an old guy at my previous employer who, when he needed to make a presentation, would do it in Notepad. Text was separated by the exact number of lines that a PgDn would get you, so it was all just one big txt document he could very easily jump through. Clever and hilarious.

my first thought is that it's a focus thing. if I have a scrolling document on screen, it's hard for viewers to know at a glance what piece of information we're currently focused on. slides break up the information into single-focus segments

How do you scroll said document on the screen? Do you do it one line at a time, show a whole page, keep current line at the top, bottom? There's such a myriad of issues and challenges associated with document scrolling etiquette, IMO.

If you think a scrolling document would make for a better visual aid for a presentation, please don’t give any presentations. Just e-mail your document to everyone and don’t waste their time.

Most scrolling implementations are bug prone, and their UX is infamously difficult to get right. Rendering a static asset at a time is an ancient pattern that tends to just work.

Think flipping through slides is mentally a bit easier to read, seeing one frame at a time rather than seeing content that is continually “loading.”

There are those presentations where you can just zoom in or out continuously. It's on Prezi.com. It can be quite engaging.

One idea:

Make a side-scrolling stream of presentation talking points, like Super Mario ... visit one world for each topic :)

Because scrolling reminds people of the infinite scroll and they walk away in the middle of the talk?

we don't like to track things that move outside our control. it takes effort to track something. even if you did it like star wars intro, then you must keep up.

Try it for 5 minutes and it should be fairly obvious.

Use whatever works. Slides work for most people.

greater focus and simplicity.