New to consulting... less than 6 months.. got butchered again for being too slow with powerpoint.. any useful tip/macros to improve would be helpful

(1) Slide clean-up: have your align, distribute, and get size buttons handy on the ribbon

(2) Storylining: put the slide headers, sub headers, and chart / box titles first. Check to make sure your vertical and horizontal logic make sense before doing anything else.

(3) Know your stuff: I can't stress enough the importance of memorizing key numbers, whether it's market growth, major SKU margins, or the spans & layers of different functions. If you can't find your facts (or worse yet, don't know them), it's hard to populate good slides.

(4) Attention to detail: do your page #'s make sense? Color scheme correct? No "jumping" boxes? That will save you a turn or two (and your manager's / partner's trust)

(5) Keep a repository of good slides that you and others make. Minimize the number of slides you make from scratch on any given run.

As an associate, I try to avoid storyboarding directly with partners. Usually, I'll work with my manager or director to craft the approach, lay out potential hypotheses to prove or disprove, and then find some data, whether from secondary research or from my client contacts, that might off the bat derail the potential story.

Once we've settled on those items and have headers and high level points in place, we try to build out the story as much as we can in whatever time we have before sharing with the partner. A lot of the time, my sections and the deck in general resemble PowerPoint vomit in terms of boxes, flows, graphics, and points, but the story is hopefully quite visible by then and gives us something to run with as we develop the next couple iterations.

I was definitely incapable of ppt when I first joined (school basically put 3 bullet points on a slide and called it a day) so I started looking up powerpoint design on pinterest and taking ideas here and there, meshing them together, etc until I built a deck I liked and have used it as a base (with some editing now and then) for all my future powerpoint. Recently received kudos from a principal for my deck! Definitely takes time, but keep putting yourself in situations where you have to work on a deck and you'll get there!!

Try to leverage other decks out there, also get a hang of using the Alt + hotkeys to do stuff like aligning, control click drag to copy existing shapes, and like the guide/grid lines

What do you mean by too slow? What is this, a live performance with your decks???

You'll get the hang of it soon. The more you do it the better you'll get. I didn't know how to align objects things when I started...

Whiteboard slides and get alignment on deck storyline before creating it PowerPoint. This allows a manager to have early engagement, and be more patient on the production side because they know what to expect.

Sketch it out first so you know what you're doing (so you're just executing, not thinking and executing st the same time). Use templates, tables, etc in Strategy& tab. Put the most common ones on your toolbar so you don't have to navigate to the different tabs. And practice a lot.

Slide cow

The aesthetics part won't take long, but true mastery lies in storyboarding and messaging of your slides

These are all great suggestions. And ask for feedback. If you are hesitant to ask from that person, ask others/peers. Firms have pre-made frameworks, icon databases etc. Find them ask around. After 5 years, now i have my own slide databank that i leverage all the time. And, 6 months in to the job lacking speed is expected. If you are slow, also try to kill it another way. Cosmetically attractive, accurate, client ready etc. good luck

KPMG 1 is right. Watch some slide cow videos on YouTube.

Story boarding sounds good in theory but how do you guys actually do it with your Partners? I find mine to be very vague and unwilling to sit down to do it. But he is quick to react when he doesn't like something

Get you hands on as many quality decks as you can and use strong slides as a template. Work on key points first formatting later (can't believe I have to say that but mangers frustrate me worrying about format on a storyboard level draft). Also format paint is your best friend if your really unfamiliar

Omg the "align" button changed my life. (I'm old compared to most 🐟 and ppt didn't used to have this feature!)

No faster way.. just a matter of time

OP go out in the internet and download a bunch of slides with good designs that you can reuse. Make a master deck of all the common and cool stuff. Use this deck to get started in new projects and this will greatly reduce your cycle time. Also, make sure when someone asks you to do something that you align on when they need it. Make it a habit to ask, when do you need this or if I have this by Tues at 2 will that work.

Honestly my slides could be better.. still learning and a long way to go!

^"Comestically attractive?" Hope I never have an SA on my team whose redeeming quality was having a gene pool predisposed to aesthetics and not intellect

What Bain1 said

Master slides are your friend.