The December 16, 2014 "Tip" listed five challenges facing the audience. The third challenge is dealing with slide transitions.
A presentation should be based on a coherent narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. The trouble with slide presentations is that they take this unified story and break it into little bits (each individual slide). Moreover, each slide transition is an opportunity for the listener to lose focus. It is the speaker's job to overcome these problems.
When you are practicing your oral presentation, think about the spoken words that get you from one slide to the next. Try to have your last thought on the first slide lead into the first thought on the second slide. Prepare the audience for the next slide.
There are some little tricks. If you can carry over a graphic element from one slide to the next it can help the audience track. In that vain, be very careful to use similar words and abbreviations. For purposes of a presentation, a car is not an automobile. You can't switch terms and graphic elements. If car sales are depicted by a blue bar on one slide, they need to be the same shade of blue on any succeeding slide that shows car sales. If you represent Toyota sales by a Toyota logo on one slide, then use that same logo on all succeeding slides that represent Toyota.
Another technique is to add or subtract from previous slides. I have seen presentations where every slide is a variation from a base slide. The audience is able to comprehend the base and then has an easy time of every new slide. It always help the audience whenever you can repeat a visual structure they have seen before.
