PowerPoint cheat sheet: Polish your slides from A-Z

It’s not uncommon to work on a PowerPoint slide before the data is finalized, particularly if it’s part of a dashboard or recurring report. This is normal during the development process, but it quickly becomes a big problem if your data is out of date when it’s time to share the presentation.

If you’ve transcribed any data by hand, refreshing it will mean a lot of manual work. You still need to do it, but it will take time. That’s why it’s always better to link your PowerPoint presentation to your data, so that you can keep track of updates and be confident your charts, tables and other elements are accurate.

Uneven slide layouts can look unprofessional and, more importantly, distract your audience from your message. The best way of keeping your layouts even is to work from a professionally designed slide template or your organization’s corporate presentation deck.

Starting from a strong foundation will save you time as you build out the slide. If you do make adjustments to your content that break the layout, consider switching to a more suitable template. This will make it easier to maintain a balanced layout throughout the process and avoid any difficulties when it comes to the final polish.

If two objects on your slide are misaligned or different sizes, your audience will intuitively try to understand why. If there’s a good reason, like you want to indicate hierarchy or a non-symmetrical relationship, that’s great. If it’s a mistake because you were in a rush, that’s a barrier to clear communication.

It’s always worth tidying up the alignment and sizing of objects on your final slide, and it doesn’t take long if you use the right tools. Besides the alignment on individual slides, it’s also a good idea to click through your whole presentation just to check that layouts stay consistent and you don’t have headlines changing size or jumping up and down.

One essential slide check before sharing a presentation is cleaning up the document properties of the PowerPoint file. You might often be sharing internally and not every presentation will contain sensitive information, but this is a good habit that will help protect your organization’s and your clients’ data when it matters.

As well as document metadata like author and date created, it’s best to use an automation tool to remove comments and presentation notes, as these may also contain information you would rather not share.

While much of data visualization is context-dependent, there are certain rules that apply nearly 100% of the time. One is starting the Y-axis of a column chart from zero so as not to create a false impression for your audience.

Check your slide objectively to see if charts are unclear or even actively misleading. There’s always a better way, such as using a Y-axis break that lets you start at zero and still highlight the difference between values. Clear, accurate visualizations help to strengthen your credibility and reinforce the story you are trying to tell.

Even if most of the items on our A-Z cheat sheet are quick to check, going through all 26 requires some diligence, patience, and time that you might not always have. That’s why we’ve made our clean-up and sanitize tool to help you out. Clean-up and sanitize is like a built-in PowerPoint cheat sheet that takes care of many essential slide checks in a single click.