u/Top_Witness_23

Somebody sends you a deck and says "can you clean this up by Thursday." Before I open it properly, I ask whoever made it two things. Who is this for, and what should they do after seeing it. Half the time the answer is different from what the deck seems to be doing, and that's the real fix.

Then I ask what I'm not allowed to change. Legal wording, the client's own phrasing, a chart someone senior already signed off on. Finding out on Thursday that a slide was untouchable is a bad afternoon.

After that I hunt for stale stuff before fixing anything visual. Last quarter's numbers, a date from two years ago, the name of someone who left, an old logo. It's easy to miss and very obvious once the room spots it.

Only then do I start on layout, and by that point it's usually a much smaller job than it looked.

What's the first thing you ask when you inherit someone else's deck?

For every deck going in front of leadership or a client, I build one extra slide before touching anything else. Not part of the actual deck. It just answers the one question I'm most scared someone's going to ask, the one that could actually derail the meeting if I fumble it live.

Used to just hope nobody asked, or scramble if they did. Now I write the real answer down ahead of time and stick it in the appendix. Whatever the actual uncomfortable truth is.

Most of the time nobody asks and it never gets seen. But when someone does, I'm not making something up on the spot, I'm just flipping to a slide I already built calmly at my desk a week earlier. Changes the whole feeling of that moment honestly.

Hardest part is being honest with yourself about what the scary question actually is. Usually not something that'd show up in an FAQ.

Anyone else do something like this or is it always just improvised?

For years, "too busy" was the feedback I trusted least. It's vague, everyone says it about everyone else's decks, and half the time the person saying it can't tell you what they'd actually cut. So I'd nod, maybe knock out a stray icon, and move on.

Then a client said it differently. Not "this feels busy," but "I don't know where to look first." Same underlying problem, completely different note, because it pointed at the effect instead of the vibe. I could act on that immediately. I couldn't act on "busy" for years.

That changed how I take feedback generally. The useless version of a note describes a feeling. The useful version describes what happened in the reader's head. "This is confusing" tells me nothing. "I read the chart before the headline" tells me exactly what to fix and in what order. Once I started asking people to describe what they did when they looked at the slide, instead of how it made them feel, the same reviewers who used to give me mush started giving me notes I could use in five minutes.

I've started translating vague feedback myself now too. When someone says a deck feels "off," I'll ask what they looked at first, second, and third. Half the time they realize the order was wrong before I even open PowerPoint to fix it.

Curious if anyone else has a feedback phrase that used to mean nothing to them until they figured out what it was actually pointing at.

I have watched people with average design skills put out decks that read as senior, and people with real talent put out decks that read as junior. The gap is almost never design ability. It is a handful of habits. Here are the ones that move a deck from junior to senior.

1. Titles that state the point, not the topic. Junior decks title a slide "Q3 Results." Senior decks title it "Q3 revenue beat plan by 12 percent." The senior version does the thinking for the reader.

2. One idea per slide. Junior decks cram three points on one slide to save space. Senior decks give each point room. A longer deck of simple slides reads as more confident than a short deck of crammed ones.

3. Restraint with color and font. Junior decks use five colors and three fonts because more feels richer. Senior decks use one accent color and a lot of white space. Restraint reads as control.

4. The ask comes early. Junior decks build to the point over twenty slides. Senior decks say what they want up front and spend the rest supporting it.

5. Nothing is there just to show effort. Junior decks keep slides in because someone worked hard on them. Senior decks cut anything that does not earn its place, even good work.

None of this needs talent. It needs the confidence to say less. That is the actual senior move.

What instantly makes a deck look junior to you?

Something clicked for me recently that changed how I build every deck. Your deck almost never has one audience, it has two. There is the person in the room while you present, and there is the person who gets it forwarded three weeks later with zero context and nobody narrating it. Most decks are built for one of them and quietly fail the other.
Build only for the room and your slides are clean and sparse, which looks great while you talk over them, but the moment the deck travels it is useless. Nobody can tell what "Q3 Trends" with one chart actually meant. Build only for the inbox and every slide is a dense wall of text that reads fine alone but makes you look amateur when you are standing next to it live.
The thing that serves both is the title. If the slide title states the actual takeaway, the deck survives forwarding, because the point is right there without you. And because the title carries the meaning, the body can stay sparse and clean for the live version. One move, both audiences.
A few things fall out of this once you see it:
Write titles as full sentences with a verb. "Q3 revenue beat plan by 12 percent" travels. "Q3 Results" does not.
Keep the body light and let the title do the work. You get the clean live look and the standalone clarity at the same time.
If a deck will definitely get forwarded, add a one line "so what" per slide. If it is purely live, you can strip more out.
The mistake almost everyone makes is picking a side. They optimize for the meeting and forget the deck outlives the meeting, or they cram everything in and kill the live version. Design for both and the same deck works in the room and in the inbox.
Do you build for the room, the inbox, or do you just make two versions?

I have been building decks a long time and I have started noticing that some of the advice everyone repeats does not hold up in real rooms. The one I have soured on is the strict "6 by 6" rule, six bullets, six words each. It sounds tidy but I have seen plenty of great slides break it and plenty of terrible ones follow it perfectly. The rule is really just a proxy for "do not cram," and once you get that, the number stops mattering.

So I am curious what everyone else has quietly stopped believing. What is a presentation rule you hear repeated constantly that you think is overrated, or just wrong in practice?

I used to go back and forth on this constantly. Half of me wanted to open a blank file and build every deck from scratch so nothing fought a grid someone else designed. The other half knew a template got me to presentable in a third of the time. Both felt wrong in different ways.

What finally fixed it was realizing template versus scratch is the wrong question. The thing that actually slows you down is not templates, it is rigid preset layouts, the ones with fixed placeholders that never fit the one weird chart or the quote slide. You inherit those, hit the odd slide, start detaching and hand fixing, and end up rebuilding it anyway, slower than if you had just started blank.

So now I keep the system and throw away the layouts. The system is the theme, the fonts, the colors, the spacing, the title treatment. That is the part that makes a deck look consistent and intentional. I keep all of that on the slide master, but I add a near blank layout that inherits the theme, and I build the odd slides on that. You get the speed and consistency of a template, but the strange slides bend like a custom build because you are not fighting fixed placeholders.

The only time I open a truly blank file now is when the whole thing needs a distinct look the house style would work against, like a big external pitch. Everything else is system on, layouts loose.

Curious if others land somewhere different. Do you start from a template, from scratch, or somewhere in between?

A while back I shared a 3-question test I run on every slide and a lot of people found it useful, so here is the follow up. These are the five problems I see over and over, across pitch, board, sales, and internal decks, and none of them are about making it prettier.

1. No takeaway in the title. Titles describe the topic instead of stating the point. "Q3 Results" tells me nothing. "Q3 revenue beat plan by 12 percent" tells me everything. Every title should be a full sentence with a verb.
2. The wall of bullets. If a slide reads like a paragraph, it is a document, not a slide. Headline plus three supporting lines, max. The detail goes in what you say or in an appendix.
3. Burying the ask. People spend twenty slides on context and one rushed slide on what they actually want. Lead with the ask, then support it. The room should know what you need before the halfway point.
4. Charts that need a paragraph to explain. If a chart needs a caption to be understood, it is doing the wrong job. One chart, one message, and put that message in the title.
5. The inconsistency tax. Three fonts, five slightly different blues, margins that shift every slide. It reads as "did not care," even when the thinking is great. Consistency is the cheapest way to look senior.

None of these need design talent. They need discipline. Fix these five and an average deck instantly reads a level up.

What would you add as number six?

After years of building and fixing decks, I stopped designing slide by slide and started running every slide through three questions. If a slide fails any one of them, it gets cut or rebuilt. It has saved me so much time that I figured I would share it.

1. Can someone get the point in 3 seconds?
If the takeaway is not obvious at a glance, the slide is working against you. The fix is to put the conclusion in the title. Not "Q3 Results" but "Q3 revenue beat plan by 12 percent." The title carries the message and everything else just supports it.

2. Is there exactly one idea on it?
Two ideas on a slide means neither one lands. If a slide is making two points, split it into two. You are not paying by the slide, and a deck of simple slides always reads better than a few crammed ones.

3. Would it survive without me talking over it?
If a slide only makes sense when you narrate it, it is fine live, but it falls apart the moment it gets forwarded. And forwarding is usually when the real decisions get made, in a room you are not in. So I build every slide to stand on its own.

That is the whole thing. Three questions, ruthless cuts. My decks got shorter, clearer, and faster to build, and honestly I spend less time in PowerPoint now than when I was fiddling with layouts.

Curious what everyone else does. Do you have a test for whether a slide earns its place?