Hilary Gridley

Presentations are 5% of your job but more than 50% of how you are judged.

-Deb Liu, CEO of Ancestry.com

⭐ See the bottom of this document for visual examples ⭐

tl;dr

If you take one thing away from this doc: the single best change you can make to your slides is to format nearly all of them in tables. Communicating information in rows and columns rather than bullet points forces you to structure your thoughts and greatly reduces cognitive load and confusion for your audience.

The key to a table is that you are cleanly categorizing all the information contained in the table by rows and columns. If you cannot come up with clear headers for each row and column, the table logic is broken.

This is why learning to think about information in tables will make you a more rigorous thinker.

Before After

Overview

Presentations have a bad rap. I often hear variations on the following sentiments:

1. I am not a designer so I’ll never be able to make good presentations
2. Good presentations are all about showmanship which is not my thing
3. Presentations are a bad use of time because half the time the meeting veers in some other direction

I’m here to tell you that not only are none of those things true, but also: getting “good enough” at presentations is one of the highest-leverage skills you will develop in your career. I’m not talking about gorgeous key-note style presentations. What I mean is: throughout your career, you will have opportunities to stand in front of a group of people and attempt to influence them toward an outcome you want or believe in. That outcome might be “give me resources” or “prioritize this project” or “consider me a competent person” or even “leave me alone please.” Your ability to drive a successful outcome in these moments can launch or sink your career.