Present Beyond Measure

10Digitize Your Analog Slide Content

Oh my reader, I have incredible news: you are finally ready to create your digital slides! Have you ever done this much preparation work before opening PowerPoint? If not, this may have felt quite daunting, but I guarantee you're going to see your presentation outcomes transform from this effort.

Once your sticky “Slide-eas” are organized within your Boxes outline, you're finally ready to begin digitizing them into slide form. What I'm going to show you next is how to create an artifact I call the presentation skeleton: a nondescript, bare-bones version of your presentation that serves as a scaffolding for you to build upon.

Now, this is extremely important: Do not design your slides at this stage. This might seem counterintuitive at first; why the heck wouldn't you just design your slides as you work? Concentrating only on content first is an integral step of my data presentation process, and whenever I choose to skip ahead to design, I end up regretting it. Let's look at why.

Avoid the “Flushed Money Trap”

Before I created this method, my very unscientific process was to create a slide from scratch, design it, and move on to the next one. Create, design, create, design. Then, a manager or stakeholder would ask to review the deck before the meeting, and they'd slice and dice it up in cold blood.

Time and again, I watched in silent horror as a significant portion of my beautifully designed slides would now lay lifeless on the cutting ...