At work, I often see slides being used everywhere. It feels like they are considered the default medium for communicating ideas, whether synchronously or asynchronously.
I am against this approach, but I acknowledge that in some cases a slide deck is the best tool to support the communication. It’s in those instances that paying attention to certain details can truly make a difference.

The presentation is the story you tell

Slides are just visual aids. What truly matters is the story you are telling, the main messages you want people to take away from the time you’ll spend together.

If you start working on your presentation directly in Google Slides or any other similar tool it’s easy to end up focusing more on the look and feel rather than the actual content.
Of course, aesthetics are crucial because they can either enhance the clarity of your message or create confusion. However, the heart of any presentation lies in the story it tells.

I usually start from the script

I jot down my core messages in a document and elaborate on each one. I make sure that the storyline I’m developing is clear and logically organised.

Only after shaping the script do I move on to Google Slides.

Here I create a slide for each one of my main messages.
The title conveys the primary message as a complete sentence, and the body contains the least possible amount of elements supporting that message.

Typically, that’s an image and/or a few keywords. When there’s too much going on in a slide - too much text, too many numbers - people try to read everything and cannot pay attention to what you are saying (and if your spoken words mirror exactly what’s on the slide…then why on earth are you using a meeting instead of a document to share such content?)
Whenever the content is slightly more complex than that - such as a few paragraphs, a list - I employ animations to reveal one item at a time, so that people don’t get overwhelmed by text.

By the way, having a script behind the slides also yelds some nice side effects

• If something unexpected happens and I cannot present anymore, it’s easier to bring somebody in and have them presenting on your behalf.
• If I have to provide the same presentation twice, I am sure I’ll be delivering consistent messages across all sessions.
• If the content that was shared during the presentation has to be permanently documented somewhere in written form, I already have a solid starting point.

Slides are just a visual aid

I think the main reason why people tend to pack a lot of written content in the slides is because they are then shared so that even those who were not able to attend the meeting can catch up.

In my opinion this is suboptimal: on one side who is following the presentation in real time will find it very difficult to both listen to the presenter and read what’s on the screen, on the other side who will have a look at the slides offline will still need to fill in many gaps.

A slide isn’t always the best visual aid

When you end up using font size 8 because your content is really complex (think architectural diagrams, organisational charts, snippets of code, a new user interface…) and reducing the font size is the sole means to fit everything in, perhaps a slide isn’t the best visual aid 🤷‍♀️.

In this case, during the presentation I prefer to directly use the tool that can best accommodate the content (Miro, the browser, or even a PDF).

Photo by Guillaume Bolduc on Unsplash