Some of us of a certain age come from a time when presentations weren't created directly on the PC (or Mac) with PowerPoint (or Keynote), or with cool new online tools like Prezi.  Back then before laptop PCs and low cost flash drives, if there was plenty of money in the marketing budget, and the presentation was really important you might create photographic slides, but usually it was paper on a flip chart stand, or more likely foils and an overhead projector (and you could write your notes alongside on those cardboard frames - oops, definitely showing my age!).   With all of these approaches, you would sit down and write the presentation first, and then transcribe the final version to the presentation medium.  These days it's just too easy to go straight in to the technology, because of the ease of shifting things around and making corrections as you go.  I regularly get seduced in to diving in to the detail, opening PowerPoint and starting at slide 1, when I should be taking a mental step back and going back to basics.

I've blogged before that my favourite book on this topic Is Presentations Plus by David A. Peoples from 1988.  David was a ...