Effective Slide Design

Chapter 8 covered how to build slides consistently. This chapter is about a genuinely different question: what actually belongs on one. A slide isn't read start to finish the way a Word document is (Chapter 1) — it's glanced at for a few seconds while a presenter talks over it. Content that would be perfectly reasonable in a report becomes a liability on a slide, and this chapter is about recognising the difference.

The "Death by Bullet Points" Problem

A slide crammed with six or more bullet points, each a full sentence, effectively becomes a script the presenter reads aloud — at which point the audience faces a genuine dilemma: read the slide, or listen to the speaker, since doing both well at the same time is difficult. This split attention measurably reduces how much of either the audience actually retains, defeating the purpose of using a visual medium at all.

The 6×6 Guideline

A widely-used rule of thumb: no more than roughly 6 bullet points per slide, no more than roughly 6 words per bullet. This isn't a strict law — plenty of good slides break it in one direction or another — but it's a genuinely useful gut-check against the instinct to fit "just one more point" onto an already-busy slide.

One Idea Per Slide

A slide should communicate one main point. If a slide is trying to cover several genuinely distinct ideas, the right fix is almost always splitting it into several slides rather than compressing everything onto one. This costs nothing structurally in PowerPoint the way it might in a Word document — Chapter 1 established that a slide is a discrete, independent unit, so adding a second or third slide to cover what one overcrowded slide was trying to do doesn't disrupt anything the way inserting extra pages into flowing Word content might.

Visual Hierarchy: Guiding the Eye on Purpose

Font size, weight, colour, and position should reflect actual importance. A slide's title should be unmistakably the single most prominent thing on it; supporting details should visibly read as secondary, through smaller size or lighter weight, not compete with the title for attention. A slide where every line of text is the same size and weight forces the audience to guess what actually matters, rather than being shown.

Text vs. Visuals: When a Chart or Image Says It Better

Excel Fundamentals Chapter 8 established that a chart type should be chosen based on the actual question being asked of the data, not habit. The same principle applies to slide content generally: "sales grew 40% across four regions" communicates far faster as a single simple bar chart than as a paragraph of prose or a wall of bullet points trying to describe the same numbers in words. Whenever a slide is struggling to explain something numeric or comparative in text, the real fix is usually a chart, not a longer bullet list.

Whitespace: Empty Space Is Doing Work, Not Wasted

Filling every inch of a slide can feel like using the space efficiently, but empty space around content is what actually lets the eye rest and land on what matters. A slide with generous margins around one clear focal point reads faster and more confidently than a dense slide packed edge to edge, even when the dense slide technically contains useful information — the audience simply can't tell what to look at first.

Hands-On Exercises