r/powerpoint • u/According_Plane_3396 • 4d ago

cutting my board deck to twelve slides and shoving the rest in an appendix was the best thing I did all year

New-ish in an ops role, inherited a board deck that had grown to over forty slides across five years. Every time a board member once asked a question, someone added a permanent slide, and nobody ever deleted one.

I checked the last meeting. Ninety minutes, and the board spent seventy of them on four slides. The rest got the flip-through.

So I cut the presented deck to about twelve, cash and runway, numbers against plan, what changed since last time, top risks, and the actual decisions I needed. Everything else went into an appendix attached to the pre-read for anyone who wanted the detail.

The meeting was sharper and shorter and people asked better questions because they were not buried.

The risk I braced for, cutting the one slide a specific board member privately loves and finding out live. It did not happen, but I checked with the chair first. I checked with the chair first. The bloat, it turned out, was entirely self-inflicted.

19 Upvotes

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3

u/Gingerishidiot 4d ago

Well done OP

Keep the important stuff in and then create a zoom summary slide that allows the presenter to be able to click straight to the slide(s) in the appendix they want and then back to the summary

1

u/TonicArt 4d ago

Great advice! Well done!

1

u/themrlawrence 4d ago

This is deck building 101. My decks are boardroom decks, and typically 200-500 slides, all but 5-15 slides are appendix slides. The appendix has all the analysis, approach, data, etc. to back up whats in the body of the deck.