This reminds me of the mercifully short stint that I did as a staff weiner. I was doing IO plans for a TF and had a PA guy who worked with me. He seemed unclear on what exactly he should be briefing to the commander during the daily update brief. My advice to him to was to write a succinct summary of the days events and put it into a draft e-mail, just in case. By "succinct" I meant only those items that the commander would care about and only in the depth that would not lose his attention, meaning less than one page. Then, add in a few blurbs about other stuff in case he asks. Then, during the brief, tell him the gist of it. If he wants the full in-depth version, the go back to your laptop after the brief, open the draft, and press "send." IF you need a slide or two as a visual during the brief, to get the point across, then go ahead and use one. If you don't need it, then don't bother. There is no rule (at least that I'm aware of) that says you NEED to make a slide in order to brief something (at least not in that task force). I think he made a grand total of 3 slides in the 5 or 6 months that we worked together. If that had any impact on his NCOER, it could only have been positive.

I, on the other hand, used slides as a tool to keep people's attention. To many people, "IO" was just some weird staff billet that nobody knew much about that occasionally issued talking points. I had to not only brief the commander, but also educate the rest of the chain of command and staff. I was continually trying to convey what perceptions were out there among the populace, what this meant to us, and how to act upon them. But none of this is of any use if people don't pay attention or care. And when you're the 8th guy to brief out of a group of 10, people are not really in listening mode. So my slides were half content and half humor. After a month or so, you could actually see people kind of wake up and lean forward in their chairs when I began to stand up for my portion. Some of the humor may have been borderline unprofessional, much of it politically incorrect, but people paid attention and it helped me to get my points across and educate them. And the content on the slides really was necessary. Most people didn't even know what IO was prior to the deployment. I genuinely had to paint a picture for them.