The 2 PowerPoint Traps That Kill Presentations

When you have a presentation coming up and you don’t know where to start, opening PowerPoint feels productive. You pull in slides from previous presentation decks. You start gathering content, dropping in data, moving sections around. It feels great to be producing something quickly.

But this is actually the root of two traps that not only waste a lot of time, but also empty most presentations of their very substance. Here are the traps and how to avoid them.

But something subtle starts happening. The slides you inherited are not quite aligned with what you wanted to say. And instead of fixing the slides to fit your message, you do the easier thing: you adjust your message to fit the slides. It takes less time. It feels like progress.

That is the moment your presentation loses its soul. Without realizing it, you have handed control of your argument to a template. The logic is no longer yours. The structure is whatever was used last time. And by the end, you have something that looks exactly like every other presentation you have given before, because it essentially is.

The other way people get stuck is more obvious but just as costly: spending hours on visual details before even having a clear message to design for.

You make sure the graphs are clean. You align the font sizes. You check that the color of each chart matches the brand guidelines. It all looks very professional. But if you have not yet decided what you want someone to understand from each slide, you are painting a landscape without knowing which scene you want to paint, or where you want to stand. Every visual decision takes forever, and once you are done, you realize the slide does not actually fit the flow of what comes before or after it.

Before building anything, it helps to remember what a slide is.

A slide is a visual aid. The word “aid” matters. It is there to anchor your message, to make it clearer in the moments where words alone are not enough. Either because the idea is complex enough that a diagram or chart does what a long explanation cannot, or because you want to reinforce a key point through a second channel at the same time.

Psychologists call this multimodal learning: delivering the same important idea through voice and image simultaneously makes it more likely to stick. But of course, you have to be deliberate; otherwise, you risk overwhelming your audience’s attention capabilities.

This is why a good slide is easy to scan and conveys one clear message that comes through at first glance. Everything else on the slide exists to support that message, and anything that does not support it is a distraction.

A quick note on the exception: some slides are designed to stay on screen for an entire working session: budget tables, project plans, and documents that the group will edit, challenge, and rebuild together in real time. Those are tools, not slides in the presentation sense. They follow different rules, and this article is not about them.

Before opening PowerPoint, you should be able to answer one question for every slide you are planning:

What is the one thing I want my audience to understand, believe, or remember from this slide?

If you cannot answer it, you are not ready to build the slide. You need to think first not only of the slides themselves but also of the presentation flow and how the slides fit into it.

Luckily, there is a technique borrowed from consulting that makes it much easier: thumbnails.

Sketch your slides as rough thumbnails, on paper, on an iPad, on post-its if you want to be able to move them around. Just give a rough idea of what the slide should look like. No more than 2 words, a sketch of a graph...

The goal is not to design anything. The goal is to think about the sequence of your argument without getting distracted by layout, color, or formatting.

Under each thumbnail, write a single sentence capturing the message you want to deliver. In consulting, this is called an action title: a sentence that states the slide’s takeaway, not a description of its contents.

The difference is significant. A descriptive title says: “Client retention over the last three months.” An action title says: “Thanks to the new onboarding campaign, churn dropped 20% this month.” The first tells the audience what they are looking at. The second tells them what to conclude from it. Your presentation should not be a sequence of information points, but a chain of arguments.

Once you have a sequence of thumbnails with action titles, you have your outline. Read through the titles in order. You should be able to deliver a coherent high-level version of the talk just from those sentences.

If the logic flows, your message is ready, and the slides will be easy to produce. If it does not, it is much easier to fix it now, before you have spent hours designing slides that will need to be redone.

With a clear outline and an action title for every slide, the building phase becomes much faster and much less frustrating. You know exactly what each slide needs to do. Every design decision has a purpose: does this element make the action title more obvious, or does it add noise?

This also changes how you think about reusing slides. **Reusing a past slide is not inherently wrong. What matters is asking: what is the specific message I want people to remember from this slide in this presentation, for this audience, in this context?**

Because the action title will almost always be different from last time, you will almost always need to change at least the title. Reusing becomes adaptation rather than copy-paste, and that is what keeps your presentations from feeling like they were built from the same mold.

When you present, you are the focus of attention, not the screen. You are the one delivering the message. The slides are there to anchor and reinforce what you are saying, not to carry the argument for you. The moment your slides are doing your thinking for you, the audience can feel it. Something goes flat. The presentation becomes a guided reading session.

When you flip the order, message and structure first, slides as support, the presentation feels alive. It feels like someone actually has something to say.

This matters even more when you are working with corporate templates or shared decks. In those situations, the slides are the same ones your colleagues use.

What distinguishes you is the ability to identify the one thing that matters for this particular meeting and to make it land. That is a thinking skill, built before you open any presentation tool.

I help experts and leaders stop enduring presentations and start making an impact.

Deliver clear, decisive presentations in boardrooms, client meetings, pitches, and every moment where your communication should be as strong as your expertise.

I offer individual coaching, team training, and an online practice group. Discover more and get in touch:

https://www.impactfulspeaking.com

Are you looking for personal coaching for your next big speech? Do you want to equip your team with the skill of speaking with impact?

I offer group training and individual coaching. Read all about it and get in touch:

https://www.impactfulspeaking.com