Ballroom vs. Conference Room Style Presentations

	Ballroom style	conference room style
style	most typical PowerPoint presentations are trying to be: colorful, vibrant, attention-grabbing, and (sometimes) noisy.	much more understated: less use of color, more details on each page, printed rather than projected
venue	take place in a large, dark room such as a hotel ballroom	more suited to your average corporate meeting or conference room
objective	to inform, impress and/or entertain the audience	to engage and persuade your audience and change their behavior
information flow	one-way, from presenter to audience	two-way
audience size	a few dozen people to several thousand	more suited to meetings with smaller numbers of people, say two to 25 or as many as 80 people in an amphitheatre-style classroom, or 200 people on a teleconference
metaphor	like that of the evening news: visually rich and thoroughly professional	should look more like an architectural drawing than something you’d see on television
medium of delivery	project your presentation rather than hand it out,	best delivered on paper. Paper has the advantage of allowing much greater resolution and therefore more information on each page.
font	minimum 24-point	as small as 9 point
reference	not easy to follow. turn back 2 slides – no, 3, what was that point there?”-type of confusion	More information on each page also facilitates more productive conversations since all the information for the discussion of the moment is right in front of everyone on a single page. Paper delivery also allows people to write on the presentation, so that they can engage with your content better and communicate back to you any suggested changes. Also it sends a message that you are confident in your content, because you are allowing your audience to walk away with it.
number of pages	relatively more	contain so much more detail on each page, they tend to have significantly less pages – from about 12 to as few as 1 page per hour of meeting time.

source: Extreme presentation