A writer ‘buries the lead’ when the newsworthy part of a story doesn’t appear at the beginning, where it’s expected. Not to ‘burry the lead’ is one of the most important rules in journalism and copywriting.
You can extend this rule to your data-oriented reports: make sure your audience knows what it is looking at right from the start and on every single slide.
Often, the author of the report is so focused on showing all the way the data can be sliced & diced that the audience gets lost.
You can avoid this by
1) keeping the main narrative in mind and linking to it whenever appropriate
2) consistently formulating conclusive titles on every single slide.
(Note: the terms ‘lede’ and ‘lead’ are often used interchangeably in the world of journalism, but they actually have different meanings. A ‘lede’ is the introductory paragraph of a news story, while a ‘lead’ is the main idea or point of the story.)