It’s easier to edit than to create.
It’s also pretty clear that our peers in Marketing, Product Management, and Engineering have time on their hands to create, judging from the long, detailed, generic presentations they provide us. Let’s take advantage of all this raw material. If we know what we specifically want to say to our audience, we can start pruning.
Here’s a tip:
Open up your 127 slide master deck and grab a pen and paper. As you scroll through the presentation, jot down the slide numbers you find relevant. 3, 5, 7-10, 22, 30-34, etc. Create a new, customer-specific deck, and start copying over those slides.
The next hour or so can be spent adjusting (improving?) the grammar and phrasing of the copied slides to your needs. I’ve found that removing half the words improves clarity. Less is more.
Yes, there’s a completely separate debate about PowerPoints: Why not Prezi? Why slides with bullets? You don’t read presentations, they’re a backdrop; just use pictures. All that is fine, but sometimes a PowerPoint is a PowerPoint.
Let’s bang them out efficiently, shall we?