9.1 Slides, layouts and text that reads
Your deck has a structure rather than a pile of text boxes.
Before:00. Getting Your FootingUnlocks:10. PowerPoint — Design & Delivery
A deck with a structure starts in the outline, not on a slide, and this topic covers writing the argument first, using layouts instead of drawing text boxes, and the one-idea-per-slide habit. It opens the PowerPoint module because free-floating text boxes are the root of most broken decks: they ignore the design machinery every later topic relies on. The common confusion is exactly that — a text box drawn by hand looks the same as a layout placeholder but behaves nothing like one when the design changes.
Work through these
Using layouts instead of drawing text boxes
Every slide should come from a layout rather than from text boxes drawn by hand, because layouts keep positions consistent and carry structure. Hand-drawn boxes are why decks drift out of alignment.
Outline view: writing the argument before the slides
The outline view lets you write the argument as text before any slide is designed. Starting here produces a deck with a spine instead of a sequence of unrelated pictures.
One idea per slide; the six-line habit
One idea per slide and a limit on lines is a constraint that improves nearly every deck. Slides that carry everything leave the speaker with nothing to say.
Reordering with the slide sorter
Rearranging in the sorter view is where the structure becomes visible and fixable. It is worth doing before polishing anything.
Practice file
- pp-01-fix-this-deck.pptx
A genuinely bad ten-slide deck: wall-of-text slides, clashing fonts, a misleading chart. Fix it.
Opens in PowerPoint. Every name, number and address in these files is made up. No account needed to download.
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