How I Got 3 Times Faster at PowerPoint This Year
I sucked at building PowerPoint slides and now I suck a little less. Here’s how I went from spending my days building slides to, well… spending a part of my days building slides.
The slow start
A year ago, I started my career as a consultant. Fresh out of an engineering degree, a lengthy startup experience and three summer internships, I was driven to use that newly educated brain of mine to create value by way of problem-solving. However, I quickly realized I was spending a large portion of my time building PowerPoint slides. Hours spent on moving virtual boxes around on a slide, experimenting with new layouts, and changing seemingly insignificant visual details like font colors. I felt like I wasn’t using my brain much on the problem-solving work that first interested me in the job (i.e., talking to the client, analyzing data, testing ideas with my team) and I was honestly disenchanted with consulting.
Over time, I progressively started to collect and practice slide-building tricks that I picked up from talking to the more seasoned consultants in my firm. If there’s one thing you can’t take away from experienced consultants, it’s their ability to churn out slides in no time. And as I became one of those slightly more experienced consultants, it felt like slide-building went from being my job description to just a necessary tool to communicate ideas.
The right mindset
I’ve found that half of the battle of making slides quickly is having the right mindset. Here are some key shifts that helped me get from an empty slide to a first draft in much less time:
1. Get stuff on the slide quickly: Like great writing, great slides aren’t made during the creation phase, they’re made during the editing phase. As soon as I realized that I’ll have to edit my slides many of times before their final iterations, I became much less of a slow perfectionist when designing layouts. The faster you reach the editing stage, the better… Just get boxes on that white page as quickly as possible and start writing in your content, the beautification will come late.
2. Think in buckets: When you make tons of slides a day, you might start thinking there are also tons of different creative ways to structure those slides. This will mess with your head, or at least it messed with mine. All slides are essentially just buckets of content. Ideas with sub-ideas, categories with sub-categories, conclusions with supporting evidence… There’s no need to get overly creative. You can overcome the white page syndrome by first arranging those buckets on your slide. That’s if you don’t already have a template slide you can use to get started.
3. Embrace “plagiarism”: In the real world (as opposed to academia), no one awards extra points for creating something from scratch if a template already exists. As I made more and more decks, I quickly started recognizing patterns and started reusing past slides’ structures. There’s only so many ways you can arrange a slide that presents 3 ideas with supporting text… This is why it’s important to save your best slides in a template deck that you can fish from when looking for a starting point.
Tools and practice
Unfortunately, being fast at PowerPoint isn’t only about adopting the right mindset, it’s also about practicing with the right tools. Experienced consultants have an unfair advantage because they have the best tools and they’ve had tons of time to integrate them into their workflows. Here’s how you can level the playing field:
1. Graphing add-in: Representing data visually with graphs is something I do every day and it would be a pain without the Think-Cell add-in (I wish they were paying me to say this). The native PowerPoint graphing tool is just alright, but it makes it a pain to build more complex visualizations like waterfall charts, bubble charts or Mekko charts. Think-Cell is also hugely helpful in annotating charts, especially in calculating and presenting CAGRs.
Another game changing Think-Cell feature is its Gantt charts. Anyone who has ever tried making a gantt chart from PowerPoint tables or shapes has either reached the limits of their patience or they’re a robot. Thankfully, Think-Cell lays out your chart timeline automatically and adding new tasks and milestones is super easy.
2. Formatting add-in: If there’s one thing I couldn’t live without at work, it’s a solid formatting add-in. There are tons of options out there but I use PowerTools because it’s what my teammates use and because it’s got all the features you would expect and more (another option I’ve tried is Templafy and it’s great for its quality assurance features, but it’s much more expensive and I’m pretty sure it’s only available for enterprises). I come back to the add-in’s features so frequently that they now make up a large part of my quick access toolbar (see section 3 below ). For reference, here are some of the features I use everyday but aren’t in my toolbar:
a. Custom slide library: Remember when I recommended building your own deck of template slides? To pull slides from your template deck to you current working deck, you’ll need to have both of them open. This isn’t a problem per se, but it’s definitely annoying. The custom slide library allows to you fetch slides from your template deck without needing to open it.
b. Split and distribute: Again, remember when I said: “All slides are essentially just buckets of content.”? I use ‘split and distribute’ to make my slide buckets from scratch super quickly. It’s a little hard to explain but you can add a shape to your slide, format it to your liking, split it and redistribute it by the number of ideas you want to present.
c. Bulk formatting: Imagine your manager tells you: “you know what, I don’t like Calibri anymore, change it all to Times New Roman” or “that blue isn’t quite blue enough, let’s change it everywhere in the 200-slide deck”. If you setup your deck using the slide master perfectly then it should be easy to make those changes in the master itself. However, most decks are setup in a way that would require hours of manually changing colors and fonts slide by slide.
3. Quick access toolbar and shortcuts: I use my quick access toolbar so much that I rarely have to open any PowerPoint ribbon. The quick access toolbar can notably enable shortcuts for certain features given ALT + (any number) will action the feature in that number’s position on the toolbar. I set up my quick access toolbar in the following way but yours should vary depending on which PowerPoint or add-in features you use most.
a. ALT+1: Aligning objects is probably the action I repeat most frequently so placing the ‘Align objects’ tool in the first position of your toolbar is a no-brainer. This way, I can type ‘ALT+1+L’ to align left, ‘ALT+1+R’ to align right, ‘ALT+1+T’ to align top…
b. ALT+2: I use ‘Match to first’ to match the formatting and size of all objects to the first selected objects. A common use case is when I add a new icon and want its formatting and size to match the icons currently on that slide.
c. ALT+3: I use ‘Swap position’ every time I want to replace an object with another. For example, when my manager asks you to change an icon for another one, I can add that new icon to the slide > select the original icon and then the new one > type ALT+2 then ALT+3 to match their size and formatting and then swap the icons’ positions.
d. ALT+4 and ALT+5: Copy and paste position is a game changer when I want the same object (e.g., title, subtitle, breadcrumbs) on many slides to have the same position. That way, those slide elements won’t dance around when flipping through my presentation, they’ll stay fixed in space.
There aren’t only quick access toolbar shortcuts to master. Learning and consistently using keyboard shortcuts must have saved me at least 15 hours in the last year. Initially, forcing myself to use shortcuts felt slow and cumbersome but the long-term time savings far outweighed the initial annoyance. There are many PowerPoint shortcuts guides online but I used this recent one to figure out my workflow: The only PowerPoint shortcuts you should really know.
A slide machine?
I’m confident in saying that I now make each PowerPoint slide in a third of the time it would have taken me a year ago. This thankfully means I now have more and more time to focus on problem-solving activities rather than being a slide machine 24/7. Or I have more time to produce more slides, oh well… However, I’ve definitely still got tons left to improve on and will continue doing so by talking to my peers about their workflows. My hope is that, by sharing my own workflow, I’ve helped just one reader spend just a tiny bit more time on value-creating work rather than on moving virtual boxes on a screen.
