This morning I had the opportunity to attend an excellent in-house training session on effective presentations.  One of the topics we discussed is how to prepare for a presentation.  Practice, review, preparation for the material and audience are all equally important.  We also discussed that sometimes unforeseen events occur that have the potential to complicate a presentation.  A good example is some type of equipment failure. He told a story of how such a situation occurred to a colleague who had issues with his slides.  He began to describe a presentation method and it occured to me that he was describing slide projectors, carousels and slides themselves.  I raised my hand to indicate that I knew what he was talking about and instantly betrayed my age.

I remeber a scene from the series "Mad Men." Don Draper pitches an idea for Kodak's new slide projector product. Arguably a scene which is one of the best three minutes of telivision ever.

Is this where the term PowerPoint “slide” came about?

‍