How do you make a really good PowerPoint presentation?
And I'm not talking about the kind you made in school with minimal text and a few
pictures, but the kind that actually get used day-to-day in the business world with text numbers, charts and diagrams.
The kind you'd be proud to send to a manager, a client, even a CEO.
For the last five years, I've been teaching people all around the world how to make
high quality corporate style presentations, like what you might see in a consulting firm like McKinsey, Bain or BCG.
And I can tell you making a persuasive presentation is not as easy as it looks, because
the truth is, most people don't want to read your presentation.
They want to get what they need as quickly as possible and move on with their day.
So if you actually want your presentation to have an impact, you have to be thoughtful
about the structure, the design, and of course, the content itself.
In this video, I'm going to walk you through my exact process of building a deck from start to finish.
I'll teach you how to leverage A.I., where to get a great template, and how you can
access thousands of real PowerPoint slides from some of the best slide makers in the world.
All that and more coming up.
The first step towards building a solid, persuasive presentation is to plan.
So let's say I've been asked to build a presentation on the state of AI in the workplace.
There's a lot of different things you can think about here.
But fundamentally, you just need to ask yourself, What am I trying to say?
My topic is AI in the workplace, but that's not necessarily what I'm trying to say because I need to take a perspective.
So let's just tweak this slightly to say something like A.I.
will completely transform workplace productivity.
Again, pretty basic, but we'll go with it.
Now what I can do is plan out the key components of my argument.
And I cannot stress this enough, this is how you make a good presentation.
Design is great and f ancy words are nice, but the most important part of a compelling presentation is structure.
So to build out a good structure, you just take your main idea and break it out into its component parts.
And the concept at work here is the pyramid principle, which I've talked about many times in other videos.
But if you want a deep dive on the topic, make sure you check out our courses.
So I have my main idea up here:
A.I. will completely transform workplace productivity.
Now I need to think about 2 to 3 supporting points for that idea.
For example, I could talk about adoption into existing workplace software like Microsoft
Office, the rise of low costs or free A.I.
tools like Charity Chatbot, and the willingness of workers to adopt new technologies like AI.
Then under each of those, I could provide more supporting ideas.
And obviously A.I.
tools like chatGPT can be really helpful in this part of the process.
I just hope my overarching message and ask it to provide clear supporting points for that message.
I also want to ask it to give me complete sentences that sound like a story when you put them all together.
That way I can just use those for my side titles. I'm actually not using any fancy
prompt or anything here, but in case you want to use the prompt for yourself, I'll paste the full text down below.
So once I have a plan in place, I can turn each of these ideas into its own slide a
nd I have the beginnings of a presentation.
But not just that, t
he overall structure of my presentation is clear and easy to follow. Which leads me
to step number two, create. For this step y
ou just need to actually put the ideas into a presentation, which starts with a nice looking template.
Best way to get one is from your company. That's going to have all the colors and
the fonts and everything you need already set up.
But if that's not an option for you, I do have a few other ideas.
The first is to search for a free one online.
Ideally, you want to find one that's good for content-h
eavy presentations, with space for a long descriptive title at t
he top. One that I like is from a company called Umbrex.
It's completely free and it looks just like a real consulting presentation.
Another idea is to use one of Microsoft's existing templates.
This can be a little more hit and miss, but if you go to this section right here,
you can search through thousands of free PowerPoint templates.
The key is you want to find one that looks professional, but also works for a lot of text and data.
One that I like is called Bright Business Presentation.
Once you have a template in place, you can edit it quite a bit by going to view and then slide master.
I can change the color, the font, even the layout of the slides themselves.
I can also add my own company logo and delete some of the cheesy pictures and stuff that I know I'm not going to use.
Plus if I want a few different layout types, I go up to the insert tab, then new slides
and select one of these. The downside to this approach is that there's not a whole
lot of options, but for a basic presentation it works pretty well.
If you want, you could even build the template yourself from scratch.
This actually isn't as hard as it looks, but it does take some time and some thought.
So if you're interested in learning how to do this, let me know and maybe we'll make a video on it.
My last recommendation for finding a template is to use a PowerPoint tool that already has a good one in place.
There's a few different options out there, but the best one that I found is from a company called Ampler.
They've got a giant library of different slides already built in, so it's really easy
to just find the ones you like and add it to your deck.
Or if you manage a team, you can upload your own template so that all your team's
presentations have the same general look and feel.
Plus, they've also got a bunch of other things that make slide building really easy,
like their storyline feature, which simplifies the planning and creation steps we
just talked about. And their charts feature, which makes building any type of chart
really easy. Ampler is actually a partner of ours s o anyone who signs up to our
advanced courses gets a free six month subscription.
But if you're curious and just want to try it out, I'll include a link to a free one month trial down below.
There's no credit card required and it's really easy to sign up.
So if you build a lot of slides, make sure you check it out.
So now that I have my template in place, I just need to take my ideas from the last
step and paste them into the title placeholders of each slide.
There's actually a lot of easy ways to do this.
One of them is to just go to outline view either by hitting control and shift and
tab on your keyboard, or clicking on this button right here.
Then you can just manually paste the main points into your outline and it'll automatically fill out the titles.
Another option is to take a blank slide like this, put in your first title and hit
Control M. That'll duplicate the slide, but then clear the content so you can just
add another title and hit control M again and again until you've got all your slides in place.
No need to worry about the design of these slides for now.
You just need to get the main structure of the presentation in place before you start adding the content.
Step number three is research.
This is where I find as much information and data as possible to support the ideas of each slide.
Obviously, this step can take a long time depending on the scope and the nature of your presentation.
For a presentation like this though I'm just going to keep it simple.
And again, this is a great time to get some help from A.
I. I'll head over to chatGPT and start my search by asking for some support for each of these ideas.
I found that it's best to just ask it to research a few ideas at a time because otherwise it gets overwhelmed.
But make sure you also specify the type of data you're looking for and ask it to provide you with sources.
You might not get the data exactly as you want it, but this will give you a really good starting point.
For example, this source right here links to a McKinsey article all about A.I. that
I can use for quotes, statistics, and other useful information for my deck.
At this stage your goal is just to collect as much information as possible and then
just sort of refine your deck as you go along.
You might find things that support your main ideas, but you also might find things that go against your main ideas.
So just continue to update and refine and you should have a pretty solid presentation by the end.
Of course, it's also helpful to do your own research, which, depending on your situation,
might need to go beyond just what you can find on the Internet.
If you're working on a consulting project, for example, you might need to conduct
expert interviews, model out some projections, or even run your own surveys.
But when you have all the data you want, just paste it into your slides and make sure you add the sources too. Again d
on't worry too much about formatting for now.
Just get the information in there so you have something to work with.
Step number four, my favorite step, is design.
Now that you've got your basic message in place, you need to focus on communicating effectively.
Your overall structure is a big part of that, b
ut how you communicate on each individual slide is also an important part, and it
starts with each individual slide layout.
We made a whole video talking about the most common slide layouts, which I'll link to down below.
But here are just three that you can use over and over.
The first is a chart slide where you put just a single chart right in the middle that supports your title.
These are actually surprisingly common and they can be very effective for focusing
on a single clear message that you have data for.
On this slide, for example, I only really need this one chart so I can keep the layout really simple.
I'll just go up here and add my chart, populate it with data, and I'm good to go.
It's clear, convincing and provides great support for the title.
Next slide type is a subtitle slide, but sometimes it's also called a header horizontal slide.
It's good for when you want to break the main idea of your title into 2 to 3 s
ubtitles that you can put at the top of your slide.
Then underneath each subtitle you can put whatever supporting data you have, whether that's a chart, a table, or even text.
And this goes back to the idea of the pyramid principle - main idea on top, supporting ideas underneath.
For example, on this slide about adoption among workers, my data can be split into two different sections.
One about adoption by generation and another about adoption by industry.
In this case, I have data to support each point, so I'll just write out my subtitles,
add charts underneath each one, and now I have a respectable slide.
Then the last type is what I like to call a table slide, sometimes also called a header vertical slide.
This is where the information is laid out in a table format.
Usually with the categories on the left hand side and the details for each category on the right.
These types of slides are especially good when you want to show a mix of qualitative
and quantitative data broken down by category.
So for example, here I have data about different productivity tools and how they've adopted A.I..
In the table, I can include all sorts of information, and it's laid out in a way that's clear and easy to reference.
These are just a few of the most common layouts, but obviously there's a lot more than this.
If you're using Ampler, you can see many of these layouts directly in PowerPoint.
But if you're looking for more ideas, I'd also recommend SlideStart.com.
This is a website we built actually that just shows real slides from different consulting firms.
You can narrow it down by slide type and by company.
Then just scroll through until you find something you like.
And if you build a lot of slides, it's actually really helpful.
Once you've gone through each slide and put it into a basic layout, you're ready for
the fifth and final step, which is Finalize. This can involve a bunch of things,
but mostly you're just trying to make sure everything ties together both visually and logically.
Start first with the overall flow of the presentation.
You may have made some changes since the initial structure, so just read through each
of your titles and make sure the ideas make sense together.
You almost want it to sound like a story where each title makes sense independently,
but also in combination with the other titles.
Next, go through the deck and see how you can emphasize the message of each slide.
This doesn't take too much effort, but it can really make a difference. Add bolding,
callouts, arrows and other features that help draw attention to what's most important.
Then finally, go through each slide to make sure there's no mistakes.
The font sizes, colors and overall look and feel should be the same from slide to slide.
But make sure you also look for typos, missing sources, or anything else that might
distract your audience from seeing, understand, and believing your message.
And if you really want to go the extra mile, send it to someone else to get their
feedback: a coworker, a client, maybe a trusted friend.
Do all that and you should have a pretty solid presentation.
Alright, that's it for today's video.
I hope you find it helpful.
Let me know what you thought of this tutorial and what you think m
aybe we missed. I'll include links down to everything I talked about down in the description.
And if you're looking for something a little more detailed with hands-on exercises
and walkthroughs and case studies, either for you or for your team, then make sure
you check out our advanced courses over at TheAnalystAcademy.com.
We've also got a lot of great free stuff over there, including a free slide building course.
So make sure you check that out as well.
Thanks again for watching.
Take care.