“You expect me to go through 80 slides? Why don’t you just tell me in 5 what I need to know?”
Since the day I started working in marketing & research, I hear decision makers complain about the length of reports.
The answer is often reducing the 80 slides into a deck of 40, but with the same amount of information cramped into those 40. See: cut it in half! That 40-slide deck, however, is even harder to digest than the 80-slide deck.
So, reducing the number of slides is not an objective by itself to help decision makers digest your report. What you can do, is this:
- Apply the ‘less = more’ principle rigorously: less data points, less frills, less colours, simpler text
- Put everything that does not contribute to the flow of the story in the appendix or in a separate document
- One message per slide
- The conclusion/implication is the title of your slide
- Everything else visible on the slide reinforces that conclusion/implication (vertical logic)
- All the titles together tell one coherent story (horizontal logic)
- Use white space generously to give the elements visible on your slide the attention they deserve