11 Steps to Presentations - Page 2 of 4

Think of cooking a meal. In the previous part of this series, you decided what to cook (conceptualization), pictured the finished dish (visualization), and wrote the recipe card (storyboard). Now it's time to shop for ingredients. In this part, we look at content.

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Step 4 - Content
Text
Data
Visuals
Media
Legal Clearances
Branding
Design Choices
Metadata
Quick Quiz

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Step 4 - Content

With your storyboard finished, you know what belongs on every slide. The next step is assembling the content itself.

Content spans several categories, and it helps to think through each one:

• Text, including descriptions, captions, and calls to action.
• Data, including charts, tables, and the figures behind them.
• Visuals, including photos, illustrations, diagrams, maps, screenshots, and even doodles.
• Media, including music, video, screen recordings, and animated explainers.
• Legal clearances, covering permissions and copyright for anything sourced externally.
• Branding, including logos, taglines, and trademarks.
• Design choices, which is many ways is part of branding, covering fonts, templates, and colors, some of which have licensing implications.
• Metadata, meaning notes on where each piece of content came from, useful if questions come up later.

This step moves quickly when you already own the material and the presentation is simple. It takes longer when you're clearing permissions for a large organization or a high-stakes presentation. Plan accordingly, since approvals rarely happen as fast as expected.

The rest of this page covers how to curate quality content.

Text

Here are some thoughts on using text effectively in presentations:

• Text is the backbone of most decks, which is exactly why it needs to be kept tight. A few well-chosen words, delivered in active voice, communicate more effectively than a dense paragraph.
• When more detail is genuinely necessary, place it in the slide notes rather than the slide. The information stays accessible to the presenter, and it doubles as supporting material if the deck is shared by email. This approach is also helpful if you need to email your presentation, and this longer text can serve the need for supporting information.
• On bullet points specifically: it's worth remembering that close to half of all presentations serve as business reports rather than live talks, and reports generally read better with structure. A minimal, visual-first approach suits a confident live presenter, but works less well when the deck needs to stand on its own. Let the intended use guide the format, not general opinion on what decks "should" look like.
• Opinions on deck length vary widely. Some argue against using a deck at all. Others build decks running past 50 or 100 slides. Others land in between, with a three-slide approach. The common thread across all of these: text still matters. Even a presenter with no slides relies on words to communicate.
• Once the text is drafted, build an outline. A plain text editor is often more useful here than a word processor, since it keeps the focus on structure and flow rather than formatting. Of course, if needed, you can create outlines in a word processor such as Microsoft Word.

Data

How you present data matters as much as the data itself. Text that overwhelms a slide creates death by PowerPoint; data that's poorly visualized creates a different problem, often described as chart clutter.

Here are a few practical guidelines:

• Not every number needs a costume. Sometimes a table is the right tool, like a phone book that lists exactly what you need, no map required. If your audience needs to look up exact values, such as prices, dates, or quarterly figures, a table gets them there faster than a chart ever could.
• Think of your data as a message and your chart as the envelope. The wrong envelope still delivers the message, but it arrives crumpled. Use a column chart when you want to compare values, such as sales by region. Use a bar chart for time or distance. Use a line chart to show a trend, the way a heartbeat monitor shows a pulse rising and falling over time. Use a pie chart only when you have a single series that adds up to 100 percent, like slices of one birthday cake. Two cakes on one chart, and nobody knows who gets which slice.
• Before you pick a chart, pick your audience. A chart is like a restaurant menu: the right one depends on who's eating. A room full of statisticians, scientists, and financiers can handle a ten-course tasting menu. Everyone else wants something they can read in five seconds. If you're not sure your audience is chart-savvy, stick to tables and the four crowd-pleasers: column, bar, line, and pie.
• Think of a chart as a signed contract. Once the numbers are drawn, people treat them as promises. If you are still estimating, a contract is the wrong document. A rough sketch of how the pieces fit together is the right one. Just because exact values don't show on a chart without data labels doesn't mean approximations are safe to use. People still judge the bars by eye, and a guessed value quietly becomes a "fact." If you don't have solid, undisputable data, build a SmartArt diagram instead. Use shapes of equal size for every series and show only the relationships, such as "A feeds B" or "C sits inside D." You are drawing a map, not measuring the land.
• Using a forecast in a chart is fine, as long as you say so. Think of a weather app. Tomorrow's 28 degrees is labeled as a forecast, and nobody feels cheated if it turns out to be 26. Problems start when a guess is dressed up as a fact. So label it. Use a dashed line, a lighter color, or a plain tag that reads "forecast" or "estimate." Your audience should never have to wonder which numbers are real. Then do the second half of the job: when the real figures arrive, swap them in. A forecast is a placeholder, like a "wet paint" sign. It has done its work once the paint dries.
• Think of your data as milk in the fridge. It looked fine when you bought it, but it has an expiry date. Before you serve it to a room full of people, give it a sniff. Check every figure and statistic before you build your chart. If time has passed since you gathered the numbers, they may have gone sour. Sales totals change, prices move, and surveys get replaced by newer ones. A chart built on last quarter's numbers looks fresh on the slide but tastes stale in the room. The gap between preparing a presentation and delivering it is where most data quietly expires. So, verify first, then build.
• Picture a road trip where every highway sign used a different font and color. You'd spend more time decoding signs than driving. Your slides work the same way. Data needs to look good, and "good" starts with "consistent." Pick your colors and fonts once, then apply them to every chart, table, and diagram. If green means "growth" on slide 5, keep it meaning growth on slide 15. Your audience learns your visual language early and stops thinking about it, which is exactly what you want. Consistency also signals that the presentation was put together with care, not stitched together from last-minute pieces.

Visuals

Imagine trying to have a quiet conversation next to a neon sign. You could do it, but nobody would remember what you said. A fluorescent background does the same thing to your slides. Background choices matter more than most presenters give them credit for. Very bright backgrounds fight your text and pull your audience's eyes away from your message. Pick something calmer that lets the content do the talking. Keep in mind that a slide doesn't look the same everywhere. Projectors and monitors reflect and display color differently, much like a paint swatch that looks one way in the shop and another way on your living room wall. Do a test run on the actual equipment if you can. Also think about color combinations and corporate identity. Colors should work together and match the brand you represent.

Imagine you're holding up a sign for someone across a busy street. You'd want it bold, clear, and easy to read from a distance. That's what your slide text has to be, except your audience is across a room and the sign is on a screen. Black or white text is the safest choice because both look neutral and read clearly against most backgrounds. If a background makes neither readable, avoid that background. If you're stuck with it, add a muted shadow or place a solid or semi-transparent rectangle behind the text, like putting a sheet of paper behind a faded sign. You have some flexibility beyond that. Blue text can work well on certain slides, and yellow can look good on dark backgrounds. Red and orange are best saved for emphasis. They're the fire alarms of the color wheel: effective when something needs attention, annoying when they go off all the time.

For illustrations and photography, built-in design tools and stock libraries are both reasonable options, provided licensing terms are checked carefully. "Free" doesn't always mean free for your intended use. Scanned images and original photography are also worth considering; original material often looks more distinctive than stock alternatives.

Media

Now, let's consider sound and video, exactly in that order!

Sound in PowerPoint can be of three types: background sounds, event sounds, and narrations.

Background sound is often a music clip that spans across slides. This sort of sound can support a presentation or work against it. The goal isn't a familiar tune or something overly calming, it's something that helps the audience concentrate. Instrumental tracks tend to work well. As with visuals, confirm that any music you use is properly licensed.

Event sounds are a genre apart from background scores that are activated by clicks, transitions, or actions. It's best to avoid them altogether, unless it is unavoidable or integral to your production. We think it hampers concentration, but then, that's our opinion, and not necessarily yours.

Narration is the third genre of sounds used in a presentation. Unless you are doing this for a basic reason, this task is best left to professional recording studios. Of course, it helps if you have a professional set-up or studio in-house. Otherwise, enquire rates by the hour and ask about the facilities available.

At times, especially when there is a live presenter, sound can be a nuisance. Thankfully, setting your volume bar to mute can resolve this problem.

Video content falls into two categories: someone speaking on camera, and everything else. For the first, keep spoken audio louder than any background music, or pause the music while they speak. Test this on the system you'll actually present from, since not every setup handles two audio tracks equally well. For the second category, standard video editing tools let you adjust or remove the audio track, so it integrates cleanly with the rest of the presentation.

Legal Clearances

Any content you didn't produce yourself, stock images, music, video, fonts, or figures pulled from external research, needs a documented legal basis before it appears in your presentation. Read the license terms rather than assuming availability equals permission; many "free" resources carry restrictions on commercial or public use. If your content references a trademark, a competitor, or another company's data, check whether attribution or a formal disclaimer is required. Handling this early avoids a much more disruptive conversation after the presentation has already gone out.

Branding

Branding brings together logos, taglines, color schemes, and trademarked language associated with your organization or the client you're presenting for. Most organizations have documented brand guidelines covering exact colors, logo usage, and spacing, and reviewing these before design work begins saves rework later. Applying branding consistently across a presentation, and across a series of presentations, reinforces recognition and signals attention to detail. When presenting for a client or partner, confirm you're working from their current logo files and terminology, since these details are updated more often than people expect.

Design Choices

The fonts, templates, and colors you select determine how a presentation feels before the audience processes any content. Verify font licensing, particularly for presentations that will be shared outside your organization or exported as PDF, since fonts don't always render consistently across systems. Templates should frame the content rather than draw attention away from it, and color decisions should balance brand requirements with practical readability, including adequate contrast. These decisions are far easier to adjust early in the process than after content has already been built around them.

Metadata

Metadata is the supporting record behind your presentation: documentation of where each visual, statistic, or quote originated, along with contact information for sources you may need to revisit. It's a step that's simple to skip under time pressure and genuinely difficult to recreate later, especially when a stakeholder asks about the origin of a specific figure. A basic tracking document listing each asset and its source is typically sufficient. Treat this as a standard part of the process rather than optional paperwork, particularly for presentations likely to be updated or reused.

Get this step right, and the remaining steps in the series become considerably easier.

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