One of the slides in the WP story credits Edward Tufte, who has written and published an essay on the subject, "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within" [1]. This, along with his seminal text "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" [2] are great reads, and I think should be required reading for anyone who has to present anything, technical or otherwise.
1) a reference books like an almanac averages 150 characters per square inch; a printed power point slide 7 characters per square inch (page 22): the visual brain starves for stimulation during a poor PP presentation.
"Avoid elaborate hierarchies of bullet lists.
Never read aloud from slides. Never use PP templates to format paper
reports or web screens. Use PP as a projector for showing low-resolution
color images, graphics, and videos that cannot be reproduced as printed
handouts at a presentation."
"Paper handouts at a talk can effectively show text, numbers, data
graphics, images. Printed materials, which should largely replace PP,
bring information transfer rates in presentations up to that of everyday
material in newspapers, magazines, books, and internet screens. A useful
paper size for handouts at presentations is 11 by 17 inches (28 by 43 cm),
folded in half to make 4 pages. This piece of paper can show images
with a resolution of 1,200 dpi and up to 60,000 characters of words and
numbers, the content-equivalent of 50 to 250 typical PP slides of text
and data. Thoughtfully planned handouts at your talk tell the audience
that you are serious and precise; that you seek to leave traces and have
consequences. And that you respect your audience."
Agreed. He advises us to make high resolution (paper!) handouts, and give them out as people walk in. I was lucky enough to attend a presentation of his this year where he did exactly that, and its effect was amazing.
Say, "Here, read this," and then give them ten or fifteen (or more, if it's a longer talk!) to read as much as they can, before talking.
This helps because people can quickly skim the parts they don't care about, jot down questions, focus on the parts that are interesting or that they want to understand better -- and not everyone feels the same about each part of your presentation.
Then, in your talk, you can basically follow a similar rubric, or allude to the handout, and people can (and will!) ask questions about the meaningful parts.
He also notes that it's important NOT to send them ahead of time in emails, as no one will read them. Force people to read them (or play on their phones); the people who are most busy will scour the paper for useful info. Jeff Bezos' [0] meetings follow a similar pattern.
[1] http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp
[2] http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi