This is probably the most repeated piece of presentation advice out there, and almost nobody follows it. Go and open the last deck you presented. Count the bullet points on the busiest slide. If it’s more than five, you’re in good company. Most of the decks we’re sent to redesign average somewhere around eight.
We get why it happens. You’ve got a lot to say, a fixed number of slides, and a nagging feeling that if it’s not written down someone will say you didn’t cover it. So everything goes on the slide.
The trouble is that the audience then reads the slide instead of listening to you. And people read faster than you talk, so they finish, get bored, and start checking their phones while you’re still on point three.
What one idea per slide actually means
It doesn’t mean one word per slide, or a big stock photo with a single line of text on every page. It means each slide makes one point. The headline states that point as a full sentence, and everything else on the slide supports it: a chart, a photo, a number, maybe two or three short lines.
So instead of a slide titled “Q3 Sales” with nine bullets, you’d have a slide titled “Q3 sales grew 18 percent, mostly in Mombasa” with a simple chart showing just that. If there are three other things worth saying about Q3, they get their own slides.
Yes, the deck gets longer. That’s fine. Twenty clear slides are quicker to get through than eight crowded ones, because you’re not stopping to explain what the audience is looking at.
The headline test
Here’s a quick check we use. Read only the headlines of your deck, top to bottom, without looking at anything else on the slides. Does it tell the whole story? If it does, the structure is solid. If the headlines are things like “Overview”, “Background” and “Next steps”, the deck is probably organised by topic rather than by argument, and the audience will struggle to follow it.
Where the extra detail goes
The detail doesn’t disappear, it just moves. Some options:
- Your speaker notes. That’s what they’re for.
- An appendix at the end, for the people who want the full numbers.
- A separate document sent before or after the meeting. A deck you present and a deck someone reads alone at their desk are two different things, and trying to make one file do both jobs is how slides end up overloaded.
That last point is worth sitting with. If your deck is going to be emailed around and read without you there, it needs more text. If you’re standing up and presenting it, it needs much less. Many of the decks we redesign are actually two decks pretending to be one.
Make the template do the work
A good template helps a lot here. If the title area holds a full sentence comfortably, and the body area is sized for a chart or an image rather than a wall of bullets, people naturally write better slides. We build templates for clients with this in mind, so the right thing is also the easy thing.
If your team’s presentations could use some work, we design both one off decks and reusable templates. Get in touch and tell us what you’re presenting and to whom.
Header photo on Unsplash.
