Convert Text Heavy Slides into Beautiful Presentations

A ton of people face this problem: How to convert text heavy slides into visually beautiful presentations. Often you would hear advice like

1. Convert your data into chart / graphs
2. Add pictures and bla bla..

 

This is cool but the problem is

1. What if the presentation is purely textual with no numbers to be converted into charts ?
2. And most times you’ll start working on the presentation at the 11th hour which has to be presented at 12th

 

Let me show what I did and share one of my recent presentation project

 

Quick Story..

A few weeks back a client of mine asked me to create a presentation for their annual HR meeting. Now typically when I create a presentation I also put in a ton of effort in structuring the content besides the aesthetics of the presentation

Only this time I was purely asked to improve the looks of the presentation without editing the content. Reason : We had no time (and may be the content wasn’t cared enough)

• The Presentation had a problem : The slides were a dump yard of text with paragraphs loaded one after the other
• The good thing was that the presentation was short, about 6-7 slides

Let me show you, how did I do the makeover of a text heavy presentation and share effective strategies for your own presentations

 

Take a look at the Text Heavy Presentation..

DOWNLOAD THIS PRESENTATION – Just stroll through the slides quickly. This is the actual client’s presentation

 

Now take a look at the makeover!

Notes

1. This is for sure NOT the best presentation but certainly quite a makeover in 1.5 hours. Agree?
2. I wasn’t allowed to edit the content but I strongly felt that the content, its flow, the story boarding and its structuring could have been a lot better

 

Nevertheless here is the completed presentation – DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETED PRESENTATION FROM BELOW This is the actual presentation that I emailed back to the client

I really want you to read the text heavy presentation.. sounds boring?  But it is critical to understand how I did the makeover! Alright read just 2 slides. DO IT

 

Key principles followed while creating this presentation

1. I never first thought about what design to apply to make the presentation look pretty
2. I just read the entire presentation twice and noted down important keywords
3. And then just highlighted them and made them bigger for assigning more importance
4. Used a few contextual vector icons to give it a better visual appeal. That’s about it!

 

Notice the 2 slides below.. you’ll see the only design strategy applied is highlighting keywords and adding a few vector icons

 

The Bottom line is : Reading and making the presentation crisper is a very effective strategy and then the design follows. Would love to have your feedback in the comments 🙂

 

A few PowerPoint Tricks to help you work a lot faster

1. How to find vector icons
2. How to import / crop images faster in presentations
3. Download 60 + PowerPoint Shortcut Guide (and START USING THEM)
4. 3 Musketeers in PowerPoint (extremely useful post)

 

Previous Presentation Reworks

1. Presentation Rework Series 01 – Strategy Presentation
2. Presentation Rework Series 02 – HR Review Presentation
3. Presentation Rework Series 03 – Company Profile Presentation
4. Presentation Rework Series 04 – Bitcoin Presentation