Emailing presentations without verbal explanation

Sending a deck to someone who will open it without verbal explanation is a problem. The slides work great on stage, but reading them stand alone does not provide the required context. There is no obvious solution:

• Making changes to slides (either modifying them all together, or adding text box subtitles to them) is a lot of work, and maintaining two master files is a big pain
• Converting them to video and adding audio tracks prevents people from skimming through, they might just give up mid-presentation
• Adding comments in the note pages does not look very nice, and many people do not know how to find them in PowerPoint.

So at the moment, I am trying something different. Over the past week I trained myself up on Adobe InDesign and am creating a framework to drop high-res images of slides into a template that adds a nice formated paragraph of text to the right of the slide. When you PDF the document, it creates the feeling of a spread with facing pages in a nice book that reads very well on a wide screen monitor. It looks beautiful, and it is easy to modify. Let’s see how it works out for my clients.