What is the rule of thumb for KPIs on a slide?

One focal KPI, with two or three supporting numbers at most.

Which set lists the four load-bearing elements of a KPI slide?

Metric name, current number, target, trend.

Which audience can handle the most density on a KPI slide?

A departmental or operational team, because it lives in the data.

PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

PowerPoint and Presenting News: November 10, 2026

Geetesh Bajaj — Tue, 10 Nov 2026 04:30:01 +0000

Good presentations stay light. This month’s stories all share one idea: keep only what matters. A slide should carry one big number, so people can make a choice instead of reading a crowd of figures. A heavy file hides extra weight, like huge photos and old leftovers, and a quick check can trim it down. And before any slide exists, a short idea and a rough sketch on paper show you what the story really needs.

Plan first. Show less. Carry less. Your audience will thank you, and your files will too.

Stay updated with the latest tutorials, tips, and news on PowerPoint and presentation techniques.

The post PowerPoint and Presenting News: November 10, 2026 appeared first on PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff.

presentaid File Size Inspector: Conversation with Laszlo Diewald

Geetesh Bajaj — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 04:00:32 +0000

Laszlo Diewald has been working as a consultant for more than 10 years now. He started his career as an employee right after his study at the Technical University of Munich. Shortly after, he decided to become self-employed as a freelance consultant. In 2017, he founded his own consultancy, with a focus on large scale projects in the financial sector. In parallel, he started working on presentaid, which was finally launched in April 2022.

In this conversation, Laszlo talks about presentaid’s new File Size Inspector.

Geetesh: Laszlo, what led you to build a File Size Inspector, and what problems were your users running into?

Laszlo: It came from a question I kept hearing, usually late in the evening: “Why is this deck so big?” Typically asked the night before a steering committee, when Outlook refuses the attachment or the upload to SharePoint crawls along.

The frustrating part is that PowerPoint gives you essentially one number: the total file size, and no way to find out where it comes from. So, people do what I did more than once in my PMO days: delete slides at random, save, check the size, undo, try the next one. Or they run Compress Pictures over the entire deck and hope it was the pictures.

What our users kept running into, and what we found in our own decks is that the weight is rarely where you would look first:

A photo straight from a phone or a stock library, 6,000 pixels wide, where 2,000 would look exactly the same on the projector.
The parts of pictures you cropped away. PowerPoint keeps them in the file.
Complete Excel workbooks sitting behind small charts.
And my favorite: slide masters. Copy a single slide from another deck with “Keep Source Formatting” and its entire master comes along, background pictures and all. Do that a few times and you are carrying designs that no slide uses. Nobody notices, because no slide shows them, and the tools we had looked at only measured the slides themselves.

So, the brief was simple: show me where every megabyte sits; in the slides and in the masters behind them. And then, tell me what to do about it, ideally with a button that does it for me.

And yes, when we ran the first version on our own presentaid presentation: 28.6 MB, and the Inspector found up to 17.2 MB to save. The cobbler’s children always have the worst shoes.

presentaid feature File Size Inspector.
presentaid feature File Size Inspector

Geetesh: Tell us how it works in practice. When someone opens a heavy deck, what does the Inspector show them first, and how does it help them decide what to fix?

Laszlo: You click File Size in the Proofing group of the presentaid Ribbon, or in the Productivity Pane. The Inspector saves a temporary copy of the deck in the background and takes it apart. That is why it needs a few seconds, why it never changes your presentation, and why it even includes changes you haven’t saved yet.

The first view answers two questions: how big, and why. You see the total size, a green badge with how much you could save, and a bar showing what the file is made of: pictures, video and audio, embedded files and chart data, slide content, masters and layouts, fonts. Below that, every slide of the deck in order as a small bar: heavy slides orange, very heavy ones red, one click to jump there. Often, you can spot the problem before you have read a single number.

Then there are three tabs. Slides lists every slide, heaviest first, with the reason next to it in plain language – for example “Picture 5 · 6,309 × 3,549 px at 473 ppi”. Expand a slide and you see everything stored on it, each item with a Select button.

One design decision matters a lot here: a slide’s number is what you would actually free by fixing or deleting it. A logo on every slide is stored only once, so it isn’t charged to any single slide. That way the numbers add up to the real file size, and you can trust them when you decide what to cut.

Masters and layouts do the same for the design behind the slides: how many slides use each master, which masters are unused, and which layouts carry weight nobody needs.

Recommendations are where the decision is made for you. Each recommendation says what is wrong, how much it saves, and what to do. They are sorted by impact, so you start where it matters and can stop as soon as the deck is small enough. Most come with a button – delete the unused masters, select the pictures nobody can see, jump to the hidden slides – and for anything you do yourself in PowerPoint, “How to do it” gives you the steps.

The biggest lever is usually pictures, so we built our own Compress Pictures dialog. It offers the same resolution presets as PowerPoint’s, but it shows you the estimated result before you commit. Then, it saves a compressed copy, opens it, and the Inspector tells you how much smaller it is than the original.

Writing a copy instead of touching the original was deliberate: you keep the full-quality deck for editing and send the light one. In general, nothing in the Inspector changes your deck by surprise – deleting masters or layouts asks first and can be undone with Ctrl + Z.

Geetesh: How would you describe the value of this tool for teams that share decks by email or SharePoint? And is there a trial version available for readers who want to try it?

Laszlo: For a team, a heavy deck is never just one person’s problem. It is copied into every inbox it is sent to, into every reply-all, and into every version on SharePoint.

By email the cost is obvious: the attachment bounces, and the workaround – zip it, upload it, send a link – costs time exactly when you have none. Next week’s version has the same problem. On SharePoint and Teams it is less visible but just as real: heavy decks are slower to open, upload and sync, and with version history, every saved version keeps its own copy.

The bigger lever for teams is templates, because masters spread. If the master deck everyone copies from carries unused designs and full-resolution photos, every presentation built from it inherits them. Clean up the template once with the Inspector, and every deck that comes after it starts lean.

Day to day, it turns a guessing game into a quick routine before you hit Send: open the Inspector, work through the top recommendations, done.

And yes, there is a 30-day free trial with all features, including the File Size Inspector, and no credit card required. The step-by-step guide is in our Knowledge Base.

My suggestion: install it and open the biggest deck on your drive. I would be surprised if it didn’t find something.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.

The post presentaid File Size Inspector: Conversation with Laszlo Diewald appeared first on PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff.

PowerPoint and Presenting News: November 3, 2026

Geetesh Bajaj — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 04:30:29 +0000

Slides are helpers, not the show. Jerry Weissman explains why pictures still beat long blocks of words, because people remember what they see. Our Ampler tutorial shows this with waterfall charts: one clear picture of how a number grows or shrinks, instead of a page of figures. But a good picture only works if someone is listening. Claudyne Wilder compares starting a talk to starting a dance. You connect with your partner first, and then you begin. Three reads, one simple rule: help people see, and help them feel included.

Stay updated with the latest tutorials, tips, and news on PowerPoint and presentation techniques.

The post PowerPoint and Presenting News: November 3, 2026 appeared first on PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff.

How Many KPIs Should You Show on One Slide?

Geetesh Bajaj — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 04:00:05 +0000

By Geetesh Bajaj, with help from David Tang

How many KPIs belong on a slide? More importantly, how many can an audience truly absorb before attention turns into overload? In this thoughtful article, we explore the balance between completeness and clarity, arguing that the most effective KPI slides are not repositories of data but tools for decision-making. Using examples from business, aviation, medicine, and psychology, they demonstrate why fewer, better-presented metrics often lead to stronger conversations and faster decisions.

Too Many KPIs?
1. What a KPI Slide Actually Is
1. 1 What Belongs on a KPI Slide?
2. The Rule of Thumb
2.1 The Rule in Plain Terms
3. What Clutter Actually Costs
3.1 The Cost in Plain Terms
4. Before and After
5. Know Your Room
6. The Basics Many Readers Skip
One Slide, One Decision
Quick Quiz
Authors and Contributors

Too Many KPIs?

Picture a colleague the night before a board presentation. The data is all there. Eighteen metrics, each one tracked carefully over the past quarter, each one telling part of the story. Leaving any of them out feels like an omission. So, all eighteen go on the slide.

The slide now looks thorough. It looks serious. It looks like a lot of work went into it. It also looks like a wall.

The next morning, the board spends eight minutes reading the slide instead of thirty seconds understanding it. The presenter narrates numbers rather than leading a conversation. Someone asks a question that the slide answers, if only you know where to look. Nobody makes a decision.

This is the central tension in every presentation with KPIs: the instinct to show everything versus the discipline to show what matters. Completeness feels safe. Clarity takes courage. And the slide that tries to do both usually achieves neither.

Where the Eye Lands

Eye-tracking studies suggest that viewers take a few seconds to establish visual hierarchy on a display. When hierarchy is weak or cluttered, viewers may continue scanning rather than quickly identifying the most important information.

A presentation where the audience is still reading is often one where attention is divided between the slide and the speaker.

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1. What a KPI Slide Actually Is

Most people treat a KPI slide the way they treat a filing cabinet: a place to put everything so nothing gets lost. That is the wrong mental model. A filing cabinet is for storage. A KPI slide is for decisions.

Here is the distinction that changes everything:

A data slide shows what happened. A KPI slide answers whether it matters.

One informs. The other drives a decision. They are not the same thing, and they should not look the same.

Think of it like a doctor’s appointment. When you sit down across from your doctor, they do not hand you a printout of every test result in your file. They look at the numbers that matter for today’s conversation, tell you what they mean, and tell you what to do next. The filing cabinet stays in the back room where it belongs.

A KPI slide works the same way. It is not a record of everything measured. It is a curated answer to a specific question.

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1.1 What Belongs on a KPI Slide?

Every KPI slide has four load-bearing elements. Everything else is furniture.

The metric name, stated clearly and without acronyms the audience may not know.
The current number, large enough to read from the back of the room.
The target, so the audience knows immediately whether the current number is good news or bad.
And the trend, a simple arrow or line showing whether things are moving in the right direction.

Four elements. One question answered. That is a KPI slide.

Before Dashboards Had Data

The word “dashboard” originally referred to the wooden board at the front of a horse-drawn carriage that stopped mud from splashing onto the driver. It was a protective barrier, not an information display. When cars arrived, the term transferred to the instrument panel. When computers arrived, it transferred again. A dashboard was never meant to show everything. It was meant to keep the unnecessary out of the driver’s face.

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2. The Rule of Thumb

Every presenter asks the same question at some point: how many KPIs can I fit on one slide? Here is the number: one.

One focal KPI per slide. Two or three supporting numbers at most, sitting quietly beneath it. Everything else belongs on a different slide or even backup slides, which are essentially extra slides placed after your closing slide, kept ready in case someone asks for more detail.

This is more than a design preference. It reflects what we know about attention, working memory, and visual hierarchy.

In 1956, psychologist George Miller published a paper on the limits of human memory. His finding: people can hold roughly seven items in mind at once, plus or minus two. Beyond that, performance drops. Decisions slow down. Errors increase.

Miller was writing about memory, not presentations. But anyone who has watched an audience glaze over at a crowded slide has seen the same limit from the other side.

A slide with eighteen KPIs does not give the audience eighteen pieces of information. It gives them just one: this is too much to process.

Think of a lighthouse. It does not light up the whole coast. It sends one beam, and every ship knows where to look. A focal KPI does the same job. It gives the eye a place to land, the brain one question to answer, and the presenter a clear opening line. Everything else on the slide supports that number rather than competing with it.

Miller’s seven was not the last word. In 2001, psychologist Nelson Cowan reviewed the evidence and argued that the real limit is closer to four chunks of information. Interestingly, one focal KPI plus a small number of supporting figures aligns reasonably well with Cowan’s estimate of about four chunks of information.

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2.1 The Rule in Plain Terms

One KPI owns the slide. In practice, that means two things:

It sits large, in the upper half of the slide, with a headline above it that states what the number means.
Supporting numbers, if needed, sit smaller below or beside it. They provide context. They do not share the stage.

Think of it as a headline on a front page. The reader sees the story first and the details second. If the main number is clear, your audience knows what to remember before you say a word. With that principle in place, we can turn to the Basic Six.

Basic Six: Six Dials That Matter

Early airplane cockpits had no standard layout. Instruments went wherever they fit. By the late 1930s, military and civil aviation had begun standardizing around six primary flight instruments, so a pilot trained on one aircraft could find the same information in another. The set became known as the Basic Six.

Later, the Basic T refined the layout further. The principle is the same one behind a focal KPI: put what matters in the same place, every time.

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3. What Clutter Actually Costs

A crowded KPI slide rarely comes from carelessness. It comes from diligence, or from a belief that more is better. Either way, clutter feels like thoroughness, and that is what makes it so persistent.

The presenter who fills a slide with eighteen KPIs is not being lazy. They are being conscientious. They tracked all eighteen numbers. They believe all eighteen matter. Leaving any of them out feels like an oversight, or worse, like they have something to hide.

Think of a museum guide who points at every object in the room. Every painting, every plaque, every light fitting. The guide knows all of it, and cares about all of it. The visitors leave remembering none of it. A good guide picks one painting and tells you why it matters. Here is what happens when that eighteen-KPI slide goes up in a room.

The eye does not know where to go. It moves from tile to tile, looking for a hierarchy that does not exist. The brain finds no focal point, so it processes everything at once, which means it processes nothing well. The presenter notices the audience reading instead of listening and starts narrating: “and this one here shows… and if you look at this one over here…” The room follows along politely, and nobody makes a decision.

Every extra number is a tax on attention. Think of attention as a budget. The audience arrives with a fixed amount, and each tile spends some of it before the presenter has said a word. Eighteen tiles can use up the whole budget before the first point is made.

Herbert Simon, who later won the Nobel Prize in economics, argued in 1971 that information consumes the attention of its recipients. The more information there is, the more attention it takes to manage it. He was describing organizations, not slides, but the idea fits a crowded KPI slide exactly.

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3.1 The Cost in Plain Terms

A cluttered KPI slide does not inform more. It decides less. The audience leaves the room having seen a lot of numbers and acted on none of them. The presenter leaves having presented a lot of data and communicated nothing clearly.

Psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper tested this in a California supermarket. A jam-tasting booth showed either six varieties or twenty-four. The larger display drew more visitors, but about 30 percent of those who stopped at the six-jam display bought a jar, against 3 percent at the twenty-four-jam display. Barry Schwartz later made the finding famous in his book, The Paradox of Choice. Later research is more mixed since the effect does not appear in every study. The lesson still fits a KPI slide: more to look at does not mean more is acted on.

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4. Before and After

The best way to see what one focal KPI does to a slide is to compare two versions of the same data. The first is the crowded slide most presenters build by instinct. The second is the focused version, redesigned around one number. Same quarter. Same figures. A very different room.

The Crowded Version

Imagine a slide titled “Q3 Performance Scorecard.” It contains eighteen KPI tiles arranged in a six-by-three grid. Each tile shows a metric name, a current number, a target, a percentage variance, and a small sparkline. All eighteen tiles are roughly the same size.

Because every tile is the same size and every label is the same font size, the eye does not know which number the presenter considers most important. The bar chart with a few large values draws attention first, but it turns out to be a minor metric. The most important number, revenue growth, sits in the middle of the grid, indistinguishable from the seventeen others around it.

The audience reads the slide. The presenter waits for the right question, but the audience is quiet. Why? Because the slide has not made anything stand apart, or told them which question is the right one.

The Focused Version

The same slide, redesigned. The headline now reads: “Revenue growth is on track. Three supporting metrics need attention.”

Below the headline, one number sits large in the upper center of the slide: the revenue growth figure, with a small upward arrow and the target beside it in a lighter color. Below it, three smaller tiles show the metrics that need attention, each with a one-line note explaining why.

The audience reads the headline in two seconds. They look at the large number. They look at the three smaller ones. The presenter says: “We are on track on revenue. Here is where we need to focus.” The conversation starts in the right place.

Same data. Same quarter. Completely different outcome.

Edward Tufte, the statistician and information design pioneer, coined the term “chart junk” in his 1983 book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information to describe decorative elements that add no information value to a chart or slide. His argument was that every pixel on a slide should earn its place by carrying information. A KPI tile that the audience does not act on is chartjunk, regardless of how accurate the number inside it is.

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5. Know Your Room

The right number of KPIs on a slide is not fixed. It shifts depending on who is in the room and what decision they are there to make.

Think of it like weather information. A pilot needs to know wind shear at altitude, visibility at the destination, and the probability of ice on the wings. A farmer needs to know rainfall forecast, temperature range, and frost risk. A commuter needs to know whether to bring an umbrella. The underlying weather data is the same. The level of detail is entirely different, because the decision at stake is entirely different.

The same logic applies to KPI slides.

1. The Board Slide

The board is there to make strategic decisions. They are not there to audit data. A board slide should carry one focal KPI, a clear headline, and at most two or three supporting numbers. If the board needs more detail, they will ask. Keep the answer ready in backup or supporting slides, not on the main slide. Keep it lean and decisive.

2. The Leadership Team Review

A board decides where the business goes. A leadership team decides how to get there this quarter. That difference changes the slide. A leadership team is one level closer to the operations. It needs enough context for tactical decisions: where to allocate resources, which problem to escalate, which number to watch next.

Picture a ward manager in a hospital. The trustees want to know whether the hospital is on track. The ward manager needs to know which ward is full, how long patients are waiting, and whether the night shift is covered. One number leads. A few more explain it. The slide works the same way. One focal KPI, two or three supporting numbers. It can carry more than a board slide, but hierarchy still matters.

3. The Departmental or Operational Review

A working session is a workshop, not a showroom. The people in the room use the tools daily. An IT operations review, a sales pipeline meeting, a finance close: these audiences know the metrics, understand the context, and can handle more density. A slightly fuller scorecard is acceptable.

Picture a mechanic’s toolbox. It holds dozens of tools, yet the drawer is laid out so the most used ones sit on top. The same rule applies to a slide. The most important number should still be visually dominant, because more detail does not mean equal weight for everything. Expect more questions from this audience, too. Prepare more backup slides: breakdowns by region, team, or period, ready to open when someone asks.

The Rule That Holds Across All Three

Think of a doctor who treats three different patients in one day. A first-time visitor wants to know if something is wrong. A regular wants to know if the treatment is working. A colleague asks for the details of the test results. The doctor answers a different question each time but starts the same way: with the one thing that person came to hear.

A KPI slide works like that. Whatever the room, it should answer one question before it answers any others. The board asks whether the business is on track. A leadership team asks where to act. A departmental team asks what changed since last week. The question changes by audience. The discipline does not.

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6. The Basics Many Readers Skip

The discipline stays the same in every room. Once you know the question and how many KPIs the slide can carry, the next job is how each one appears. Getting the count right is only half the work. How each KPI is presented matters just as much.

Here is a plain-language checklist for building a KPI slide that works, covering the basics that often get skipped in the rush to get the numbers on the screen.

1. Name the Metric Clearly

Write the full name of the metric, not the acronym. Not every person in the room will know what CAC means, or NPS, or EBITDA. If the acronym is unavoidable, put the full name in smaller text in the slide footer. A number nobody can identify is a number nobody can act on.

2. Show the Current Number and the Target Together

A number without a target is just a number. It has no meaning until the audience knows what good looks like. Put the target beside or below the current figure, in a lighter color or smaller size, so the relationship is immediately visible. The audience should be able to answer, “are we on track?” in under two seconds.

3. Add a Trend

A single number tells you where you are. A trend tells you which direction you are heading. A simple arrow, up, flat, or down, or a minimal sparkline covering the last three to six periods, gives the audience the context they need to assess whether the current number is improving or deteriorating. Without it, every number is a snapshot with no story.

4. Use Color Sparingly and Consistently

Red and green carry meaning in a business context. Use them only when the status is unambiguous: green when the metric is on or above target, red when it is meaningfully below. Amber for borderline. Do not use color decoratively, and do not introduce a fourth color without a clear reason. A slide where everything is color-coded but nothing is prioritized has not used color. It has used decoration.

5. Write a Headline that States the Insight

The title of a KPI slide should not say “Q3 Revenue.” It should say, “Revenue is on track” or “Revenue growth has slowed for the second consecutive quarter.” The title is the most-read line on the slide. Use it to tell the audience what the number means, not just what it is called.

Viewers tend to look at the title early, so it is worth using. A title that names a topic (“Q3 Revenue”) wastes it. A title that states the insight (“Revenue is on track”) tells the room what to conclude. Studies of assertion-evidence slides support the habit, although they involve students and technical content, not KPI decks.

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One Slide, One Decision

Open a map app and zoom out to the whole country. You see highways and major cities. Zoom in to a city and the highways fade, and main roads and districts appear. Zoom in again and you see street names and bus stops. The map never shows everything at once. At each scale, it shows only what a traveller needs there.

That is the principle behind this article, and behind the two pieces before it in this series. In KPIs Are Not Scary, the scale was a single number: the one you check to know if you are on track. In Five Metrics Every CEO Wants to Know, the scale was a set of numbers: the few that answer a chief executive’s questions. In this article, the scale is a slide: the one number that owns it.

Yes, it is the same discipline, applied at a different scale.

With KPIs in general: not how much we can measure, but what do we need to know to make the next call.
With a KPI presentation: not how much data can we show, but what does this audience need to decide.
With a KPI slide: not how many numbers can we fit, but which number owns this slide.

The presenter who walks into a board meeting with one focal KPI per slide, a clear headline, and the confidence to leave the other eleven numbers in the appendix is not showing less. They are giving the room more: more clarity, more speed, and a far better chance of making a decision before the meeting ends.

A slide with one strong KPI and a headline that states what it means gives a room something a crowded scorecard never does.

Not more information. A faster, better decision.

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Quick Quiz: The Ideal Number of KPIs per Slide

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Authors and Contributors

Geetesh Bajaj is a globally recognized expert in presentation design and strategy, having earned the Microsoft PowerPoint MVP designation for 25 consecutive years, a distinction awarded to individuals who demonstrate deep technical expertise and make sustained contributions to the broader professional community. As a behind-the-scenes strategist within the presentation ecosystem, Geetesh partners with a diverse set of stakeholders, including PowerPoint add-in innovators, creative agencies, and senior business professionals—to advance the clarity, effectiveness, and strategic impact of visual communication.

Based in Hyderabad, India, Geetesh is also the author of six published books. Beyond his professional focus, he pursues interests in reading, photography, and global cuisine through travel and immersive culinary experiences.

David Tang is the founder of Flevy, the marketplace for business best practices–the same as those produced by top-tier consulting firms and used by Fortune 100 organizations. Flevy is the largest library of best practice documents available online. Prior to Flevy, David worked as a management consultant, where his clients ranged from startups to Fortune 15. David has a MEng and BS in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Cornell University. After Flevy, David created specialized sites such as PPT Depot and KPI Depot.

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Presenters Establishing Rapport

Geetesh Bajaj — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 04:00:39 +0000

By Claudyne Wilder

Recently I was talking to a Public Relations firm. We discussed the need for every presenter to establish rapport with the audience. How do you do it? How come some people do it so well?

Image: Yay Images

As a student of Argentine Tango, I compare establishing rapport to starting to dance with a new partner. The couple walks to the floor. They get in the dance position, BUT they don’t immediately start dancing. They may mark the step and not move, or they may just stand there and feel each other’s internal rhythm. Then, when the leader feels connected, the dance starts.

How do you start this “dance” before the formal presentation begins? Here are several ideas:

Establish rapport before the presentation begins. Once you have that connection, the presentation will feel better to the audience right from the start.
Some type of conversation should take place. Depending on the audience’s formal or informal culture, the conversation may be about the topic at hand or an unrelated subject.
There needs to be an agreement, usually unspoken, that the audience will listen and silently participate in your presentation. You must demonstrate by body posture, voice tone, and eye contact that you are excited and enthusiastic about speaking to this particular group.

In Tango, each partner signals to the other how close he or she will start the dance. That distance may change with each step, but both begin the dance respecting their partner’s distance.

Claudyne Wilder runs a boutique presentation business. Wilder Presentations offers Get to the Message presentation workshops and consulting services to organizations ranging from Fortune 500 pharmaceutical firms to community-based non-profits. Claudyne is the creator of TorchMetrics, an innovative online tool that operates on your device as a customized speaking coach.

With a Masters in organizational development, Claudyne coaches on including the right content with the right number of details as well as on message-oriented slides and persuasive, engaging delivery. Having extensively studied Argentine Tango for over ten years, she brings the idea of “connection” to her clients to help them more passionately engage with their audience.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.

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Why Use Slideshows at All?

Geetesh Bajaj — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 04:00:22 +0000

By Jerry Weissman

In a 2001 article in Small Business Computing, writer Angela Garber expressed the universally negative reputation of cluttered slideshows by coining the frequently cited epithet, Death by PowerPoint. Given the constant disparagement of slideshows by critics, audiences, and even by presenters themselves, why would anyone continue to use them?

After all, the memorable speeches of history did not use PowerPoint:

Cicero’s orations in the Roman Forum
Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address
Winston Churchill’s World War II rally to arms
Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights speech
John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address

President John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address.
President John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address

So why, indeed, would anyone use slides? The simple answer lies in the aphorism, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

Those familiar words are backed by a wide array of scientific evidence. One of the most thorough is an HP publication titled, The Power of Visual Communication, which cites nine learned sources and concludes that:

Recent research supports the idea that visual communication can be more powerful than verbal communication, suggesting in many instances that people learn and retain information that is presented to them visually much better than that which is only provided verbally.

Even more to the (Power) point is the opinion of Stephen M. Kosslyn, the author of Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling PowerPoint Presentations, a book based on his work at the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. As Dr. Kosslyn put it in one of his academic studies:

The timeworn claim that a picture is worth a thousand words is generally well-supported by empirical evidence, suggesting that diagrams and other information graphics can enhance human cognitive capacities in a wide range of contexts and applications.

Another respected expert on visual expression was Hans Rosling, a Swedish medical doctor and statistician, whose revolutionary graphical display methodology electrified his high-profile TED conference and made him an instant media and talk circuit rock star. Ten thousand words would not be adequate to describe his technique, so please see it for yourself in his video on YouTube.

Hans Rosling’s 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes – The Joy of Stats – BBC.
Hans Rosling’s 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes – The Joy of Stats – BBC

A New York Times article about Dr. Rosling described the impact of his graphics:

The goal of information visualization is not simply to represent millions of bits of data as illustrations. It is to prompt visceral comprehension, moments of insight that make viewers want to learn more.

In that one sentence, Dr. Rosling, his dynamic software notwithstanding, validates the primacy of the presenter over even his superb graphics. More than that, he tells you not only why, but how to use your slides.

This blog is an excerpt from my book Winning Strategies for Power Presentations published by Pearson. Also, check out my newly released Presentation Trilogy—Presenting to Win, The Power Presenter, and In the Line of Fire—available on Amazon and other retailers.

Jerry Weissman is the founder and president of Suasive, Inc., formerly Power Presentations, Ltd. Jerry founded Suasive in 1988 and quickly established himself as the coach for Silicon Valley CEOs delivering critical presentations for their IPO roadshows. He taught them to tell their company stories through the eyes of their investors, and in so doing, significantly increased the valuations of their companies. He amassed an elite client list and soon widened his focus to helping public and privately held companies develop and deliver all types of business presentations.

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PowerPoint and Presenting News: October 20, 2026

Geetesh Bajaj — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 04:30:52 +0000

This issue is about doing the job properly the first time. SimpleDim brings real measurements into PowerPoint, so a warehouse layout or a floor plan on a slide is not just a picture but an actual, to-scale drawing you can trust. Laszlo Diewald’s Dynamic Grid 2 does the same for data: one click refreshes your table straight from SharePoint, so the numbers in the room are always the current numbers, not last week’s. And Ramgopal’s book, Clear Slides, makes the same argument about thinking: organize your ideas before you open PowerPoint, because a clear head makes a clear slide. Three different tools, one simple rule: get it right early, and the rest gets easier.

Stay updated with the latest tutorials, tips, and news on PowerPoint and presentation techniques.

The post PowerPoint and Presenting News: October 20, 2026 appeared first on PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff.

Dynamic Grid 2: Conversation with Laszlo Diewald

Geetesh Bajaj — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 04:00:46 +0000

In this conversation, Laszlo talks about presentaid’s new Dynamic Grid 2.

Geetesh: Laszlo, let’s start with the “why.” Dynamic Grid has been part of presentaid for some time. What led you to rebuild it as v2 instead of adding features one at a time, and was SharePoint support the main driver, or part of a larger plan?

Laszlo: Dynamic Grid started as a way to solve one problem: stop rebuilding the same PowerPoint tables from Excel every week. That worked well as a one-way, single-source tool. But as more teams adopted it, the requests started stacking up – SharePoint access, on-demand refresh, richer column types, more styling control – and every one of them touched the same underlying assumption: that a grid was built once from Excel and stayed static after that. Bolting each request onto that architecture individually would have meant patching the same weak spot again and again.

So, instead we rebuilt the engine underneath the Dynamic Grid to treat data as something live and swappable, not a one-time import. SharePoint support was the single most requested feature, but it was really the forcing function for a bigger plan: make the grid work the way our users’ data actually lives – spread across Excel, SharePoint, and pivot tables – and keep it connected instead of frozen the moment you paste it in. All the visuals that presentaid creates are pixel-perfect, PowerPoint native shapes, not just a rendered image from a source.

presentaid feature DG SharePoint Refresh.
presentaid feature DG SharePoint Refresh

Geetesh: Tell us how v2 changes day-to-day work for existing presentaid users.

Laszlo: The biggest shift is the Refresh button.

Before, updating a grid meant triggering it freshly from Excel, applying the same filters, choosing the correct template and so on. Now it’s one click, inside PowerPoint, and the data’s current. For anyone whose source of truth lives in a SharePoint list rather than an Excel file, they can finally point the grid straight at it instead of exporting to Excel first as a workaround.

The new column types: flags, sliders, and bar charts replace a lot of manual conditional formatting people were doing by hand.

And being able to add several columns at once or go back and edit a saved template instead of rebuilding it, just removes friction from the parts of the job that were never the interesting part anyway.

Geetesh: For teams or individuals still creating grids by hand or relying on static Excel links, how would you describe the value of upgrading to v2?

Laszlo: The honest cost of the manual approach isn’t really the time – though that adds up – it’s the risk. A static link or a copy-pasted table is only accurate the moment you built it. Show up to a steering committee with last week’s numbers because nobody remembered to refresh the deck, and that’s a credibility problem, not just an inconvenience. Dynamic Grid V2 means the numbers in the room are the numbers in the source system, on demand, without anyone needing to remember to update anything. If you’re producing the same report on a recurring basis – status decks, trackers, board updates – that reliability compounds every single cycle.

Geetesh: Is there a trial version of presentaid including the new Dynamic Grid 2 available for readers who want to try it themselves?

Laszlo: Yes, we offer a free trial that contains all features, including the new Dynamic Grid. This trial is valid for 30 days, and no credit card is required.

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Clear Slides: Conversation with Ramgopal M. S.

Geetesh Bajaj — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 04:00:29 +0000

Ramgopal M. S. is the founder of Presentation Process and author of Clear Slides. Over the past 20 years, he has helped millions of professionals communicate complex ideas through clear, engaging presentations. His YouTube channel has over 560,000 subscribers, where he shares practical PowerPoint and presentation design techniques.

In this conversation, Ramgopal discusses his new book, Clear Slides.

Geetesh: Ramgopal, what made you write Clear Slides now, and who did you have in mind as the reader while writing it?

Ramgopal: : I’ve been helping people create presentations for more than 20 years. And over time, I’ve noticed something. When people struggle with presentations, they often think they need better slides. They look for better designs, templates, and visuals. But sometimes, the problem isn’t the slides at all. They have a lot of knowledge, but they aren’t sure how to organize it or explain it clearly to someone else.

That’s what I wanted to address in Clear Slides. I wanted to help people think through their ideas before they start making slides. I had doctors in mind when I wrote the book. Doctors know a great deal about their subjects, but they also need to present research, explain clinical cases, and teach other people. And explaining something clearly is a skill in itself.

So, even if someone knows their subject very well, that doesn’t automatically make them a good presenter. Knowing something and explaining it are two different skills. When you know a subject well, you can easily forget how much you know that your audience doesn’t. You might jump straight into the details without giving people enough background to understand them. The challenge is to take what you know and organize it in a way that makes sense to someone who is listening to you for the first time.

I felt there was a need for a book that would help doctors with this part of their work. But the problem isn’t limited to doctors. Anyone who needs to explain something complex to others can face the same difficulty. That’s what makes this subject interesting to me.

Geetesh: The book’s subtitle is A Doctor’s Guide to Turn Complex Ideas into Clear Presentations. But readers from other fields have also praised the book in their Amazon reviews. What drew you to clinicians as your audience, and what carries over to everyone else? /strong>

Ramgopal: I chose doctors because I could see how important clear communication is in their work. They deal with a lot of complex information. When they present a clinical case or research findings, they need to help their audience understand what the information means and how the different pieces fit together. And I realized that this is not just a problem doctors face.

Think about an engineer explaining a technical problem, a consultant presenting a business strategy, or a teacher explaining a difficult concept. They all face the same basic challenge. They know their subject thoroughly, but their audience may not know as much as they do.

The engineer may understand exactly why a system is failing, but the audience needs to understand the reasoning behind the conclusion.

The consultant may have studied a business problem for weeks but has only a few minutes to explain what matters and what needs to be done.

The teacher may know a subject inside out but still needs to find a way to make it understandable to students.

The situations are different, but the underlying problem is similar.

Would I say that this book isn’t just about medical presentations? Is it about explaining complex ideas? That’s a fair way of putting it. The examples may come from medicine, but the basic principles apply much more broadly. You need to decide what your audience needs to understand, organize your ideas, and show how the different pieces fit together. You can’t simply put all your knowledge on slides and expect the audience to make sense of it. You have to guide them through the explanation.

Stop struggling with confusing presentations. Learn how to design clear slides that ensure your audience actually understands your ideas.
Why I Finally Wrote Clear Slides After 20 Years of Teaching Presentations

Geetesh: Most books on presentations are method guides. They give you principles, frameworks, and steps to follow. Why did you decide to tell Clear Slides as a story?

Ramgopal: I could have written a book that simply listed the principles of creating clear presentations. There is nothing wrong with that approach. But I wanted readers to see how these ideas work in real situations. It’s one thing to tell someone, “You should organize your ideas before making slides.” It’s quite another to show someone struggling with a presentation, making mistakes, and slowly figuring out what works. When you follow a character through that process, you can see why certain approaches fail and why others work better.

Some might say that a framework is more practical, because you can refer to it whenever you need to create a presentation. Yes, frameworks are definitely useful. They give you a process to follow. But knowing the steps and knowing how to apply them are two different things. Suppose I give you a framework that says you should identify your central message before making slides. You may understand that instruction perfectly well. However, when you sit down to create your next presentation, you may still struggle to decide what that central message should be. That’s where seeing someone work through the problem can help. You see the choices they make, the mistakes they run into, and how they eventually find a better way forward.

Creating a clear presentation isn’t just about following a sequence of steps. You have to make decisions. What should I include? What can I leave out? What does my audience need to understand first? How do I connect one idea to the next? A framework can guide those decisions. But a story helps you see why those decisions matter and what happens when you get them wrong.

Geetesh: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

Ramgopal: My hope is that readers won’t just learn a few presentation techniques. I want them to start thinking differently about their presentations. Instead of immediately opening PowerPoint and asking, “How should I design these slides?”, I want them to pause and ask, “What exactly am I trying to explain, and how can I make it easier for someone else to understand?” Because once you get that part right, creating the slides becomes a much more meaningful exercise.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.

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PowerPoint and Presenting News: October 13, 2026

Geetesh Bajaj — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:30:07 +0000

This issue is about what happens when you stop leaving things to chance. The guides tutorial shows how a line on a slide is never just a line: it snaps, it inherits, it governs, and it will quietly run your layout if you let it. Understanding that is the difference between slides that look deliberate and slides that look lucky. Avinash Panneerselvam’s AECharts interview takes the same idea into charting: polished, animated, design-first charts that drop cleanly into any deck without negotiating with PowerPoint’s own chart engine. And Matteo Cassese’s Founder Journey conversation goes further still, asking what it means to move from telling stories to building myths, and whether your presentations belong to a bigger narrative you haven’t named yet.

Stay updated with the latest tutorials, tips, and news on PowerPoint and presentation techniques.

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