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News Flash...Practice is how you get better at any skill...from first learning to walk to making PowerPoint presentations. That said, practice only helps if you are practicing the right thing. If you're slicing your golf ball, doing more of the same will only ingrain the bad technique. It will not improve it.
I suggest you review existing presentations you consider excellent alongside mediocre ones ( or yours) . What elements make you see one as stellar and the other not? These are the details that set them apart. Make a list and check your output against it.
My advice would be to think about when originality truly matters and when you’re just better off creating a slide that’s clear and concise and moving on to something else. Know your client and what matters to them. I’ve always found that clients who came from consulting are extremely particular and focused on formatting, verb tense consistency, etc., whereas a lot of stakeholders without that background just want the information in whatever way is easy to digest.
I’ve been in the same boat. One thing that I’ve found has helped is scheduling time with manager or people better at slides than I am to walk through some I’ve made and some they’ve made. I ask them to give me ways on how to improve mine and ask them to explain how they made theirs. It’s not perfect, but it’s helped me understand the process better.
What I do is I keep an inspiration deck full of any slide I have ever liked the style of. I then flip through and get inspiration and Frankenstein what I think will work to tell my story. I also watched a lot of analyst academy youtube videos that really helped me.
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Go work for Deloitte, they put together beautiful slides. Can’t execute on work but the slides…
Can confirm
Understand deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning for crafting a story with slides. Understand slide design and basic human psychology (people read left>right, top>down, partition your message accordingly), we overuse icons that are irrelevant and drives me nuts, if using visuals make sure it serves a purpose. I always sketch in my notebook or whiteboard before creating a new idea on a slide. It’s much faster than keyboard shortcuts and mouse clicks. Finally, remove ego and pride of authorship. There are a myriad of Partner preferences where some of my best work imo was scrapped because of personal (usually wrong) taste of superiors
Rising Star
Analyst Academy is a good resource
Look on the portal for “sliding like a consultant” and use QPT. You can get it from the portal as well. Practice using QPT and talk to a change management practitioner. :)
Use a prompt in chat gpt to get ideas on how to structure your deck, topics to discuss and graphics suggestions
I keep what I adoringly call a “sticker book”. When I’m trying to come up with a format I often ask Google images and I keep various ideas in my sticker book. Over time it is hundreds of references for ideas and I am still adding new ones
O my. It’s expanded. I keep regular formatted shapes on a few pages. I have several pages of icons. Pages of logos. Pages of photos. Probably at least 30 pages of slide examples (they each have 3-4 photos of slide layouts on them).
In CDD my manager accused me of taking the cheap way out to perfecting the rapid custom shape creation. Thankfully the founder thought it was strategic
Learn basic things like how to group, align, use the eye dropper for colors etc. I work in ppt all day in PAS and use these skills daily - they’re a life saver
Find 6-8 slide layouts and repeat those forever
Happy to send you my file call sweet treats
Has a whole bunch of great templates and graphics you can use that makes you ppt looks awesome
Send me your email
Can I grab a copy of this pls?
I found PowerPoint addins with features that help structure slides were really helpful in improving my PowerPoint skills. I use one called “PowerPoint PowerTools” which I found better than my firms internal ancient poorly maintained addin
Focus on content if that is crap no one will give shit to formatting and how beautiful slide is
Pro
When content is crap, you need to have more beautiful slide. 😅 The last thing you want is ugly slide with crappy content
Slide Egg https://www.slideegg.com/
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There are some artists who only use PowerPoint to make visuals. They're very open about their te unique
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