origin of slide deck presentation

What is a Slide Deck? Everything You Need to Know!

By: Author Shrot Katewa

In my personal experience alone, I’ve seen people use very many different words including the word “Slide Deck” for a presentation. I always wondered what is the meaning of Slide Deck, and how is it different from other words commonly used to describe a presentation. So, I did a little research, and here’s what I found out!

A Slide Deck is a term assigned to a group of slides that together form a complete presentation. A slide deck is usually created using a presentation design application. A slide deck is often used as an aid for storytelling or presenting information about a topic or an organization.

But, how is a slide deck different from a slide show or a PowerPoint? In this article, we will understand the nuances of the various presentation terminologies used. Plus, I will also help you understand why is a slide deck really called a slide deck!

So, let’s get started.

A Quick Note Before We Begin – if you want to make jaw-dropping presentations, I would recommend using one of these Presentation Designs . The best part is – it is only $16.5 a month, but you get to download and use as many presentation designs as you like! I personally use it from time-to-time, and it makes my task of making beautiful presentations really quick and easy!

What is a Slide Deck?

When it comes to describing a presentation, there are several words that are used. One word that is often used is a “Slide Deck”.

As mentioned above, a slide deck really is a collection of slides put together to form a presentation. A slide deck is used in many organizations to give an overview about their organization, to share strategies or plans, or showcase performance updates, or even just sharing a piece of interesting information about a topic. There are several use cases for a slide deck!

You may wonder, “Is slide deck not just the same as a presentation?”. If so, then why not just call it a presentation instead of a slide deck? Why use the term slide deck at all?

Pro Tip: All slide decks are presentations, but not all presentations can be classified as a slide deck!

A presentation is usually a much broader term. For instance, when you are displaying a physical product and verbally sharing nuggets of information about that product, it is still referred to as a presentation. More specifically, it is called a product presentation.

The key difference between a slide deck and presentation is that a presentation is an act of delivering information such as a speech or a talk. Whereas, a slide deck is the visual aid used while giving a presentation!

Although the two terms are often used interchangeably, a slide deck and a presentation are actually two different terms!

Why is a Slide Deck called a Slide Deck? A Brief History!

The term slide deck evolved from an old technology that was used for projecting the slides on the wall. A physical 35 mm slide was inserted into a carousel slide projector . All the slides that were used during a presentation were collectively known as a slide deck (as in a deck of cards).

The term “slide deck” stuck around and became synonymous with a presentation even after the technology evolved . Thus, even today, many people refer to a presentation as a slide deck.

If you are wondering how this projector really worked, then you would be amazed to know that each model came with slots for 40 or 80 slides that could be inserted at a time.

Each slide would be placed upside down and backward in terms of the chronological order so that the image projected is in the correct orientation and order. The slide themselves were usually photographs and not much could be done on the slide.

Difference Between Slide Deck and Slide Show?

Another term that people often use interchangeably is a slide deck and a slide show.

A slide deck is the group of slides used to create a presentation. However, when these slides are displayed or shown to an audience while giving a presentation, the process is known as a slide show.

In other words, a slide deck is usually a presentation file whereas a slide show is a process of showing the contents of that file to an audience.

Slide Deck vs PowerPoint: What’s the Difference?

I’ve also seen people get confused between a slide deck and PowerPoint. Again, these are also another set of terms that are used interchangeably. But, there is a difference.

As mentioned before, a slide deck is usually a group of slides collectively put together to give a presentation. The term slide deck has existed even years before PowerPoint was introduced. As we learned above, a slide deck was initially used to describe the batch of physical slides used in a projector.

PowerPoint, on the other hand, is a presentation design software. Unlike a slide or a presentation, PowerPoint is actually a program that is used for designing a slide or creating a presentation.

As the technology evolved and a computer started to have more computing power, complex applications were designed to enable the ease of leveraging technology.

Contrary to the common opinion, PowerPoint was not created by Microsoft. It was first released by Forethought Inc in 1987 initially only for Mac OS. However, Microsoft acquired PowerPoint 3 months after its initial release and rebranded it as Microsoft PowerPoint.

What is the Difference Between Slide Deck and a Pitch Deck?

Another term that you may hear often, especially in the more recent times, is a pitch deck. It is important to note that using the two interchangeably might not be the correct thing to do. Here’s why –

A slide deck is basically all the final slides put together to create a presentation. However, a pitch deck is a type of a slide deck created with a very specific purpose of pitching an idea or a business model to an investor with the intention of raising funds for implementing the idea.

In this era of start-ups and entrepreneurs, a pitch deck is quite common. In fact, every time an organization is looking to raise funds for the project or business, a pitch deck is required.

Simply put, a pitch deck can also be called a slide deck, but not all slide decks can be referred to as a pitch deck!

What is a PowerPoint Slide Deck?

There are multiple ways of creating a slide deck. As we learned earlier, traditionally a slide deck was created using actual physical slides.

As the technology evolved, sophisticated computer applications were used to create a slide deck. One such application is Microsoft PowerPoint.

A PowerPoint slide deck is a term used to describe a slide deck or a presentation that is created using Microsoft PowerPoint as the presentation design application. A PowerPoint slide deck usually consists of multiple slides put together to create a presentation.

That said, a PowerPoint slide deck is more commonly referred to as a “slide deck” or just “Presentation” as PowerPoint is not the only presentation design application available to a user.

What is a Slide Deck in Google Slides?

Although PowerPoint has been one of the most well-known and commonly used presentation design programs, another application that has been gaining in popularity amongst the users is Google Slides!

The idea of a slide deck in Google Slides is pretty much the same. When you put together all the final slides that are going to be used in a presentation using Google Slides, it is known as a slide deck in Google Slides.

If you are not sure what exactly is Google Slides and would like to understand this a bit more in detail, I’ve written a detailed post on this topic. Make sure you check it out! Click on the below link.

What is Google Slides? The ULTIMATE Guide!

How to Make a Slide Deck in PowerPoint?

If you are using PowerPoint, one of the things that you may often be asked to do at work is to make a slide deck in PowerPoint. But, how exactly do you do that? Let me try to answer this question.

Here’s how to make a slide deck in PowerPoint –

Open a PowerPoint Presentation
Create a structure for your content
Create a Title Slide
Design the Other Remaining Slides
Use Images relevant to the content
Add Animations and Transitions
Create a Thank You Slide
Save Your Slide Deck
Share the File with your team

Honestly, this topic deserves a separate article in itself. Perhaps even a single article may not be complete enough to cover this topic.

How to Make a Good Slide Deck?

Let’s face it – most of us don’t want to come across as incompetent. Thus, making a good slide deck is almost always important. But, how exactly does one do that?

There are actually several things that you can do to make an attractive presentation. I actually wrote a detailed article on how to easily create a good slide deck. The tips that I share in that article are also relevant for beginners. So, make sure you check out that article as well! The link is mentioned below.

7 EASY tips that ALWAYS make your PPT presentation attractive (even for beginners)

More Helpful Resources –

Should You Add Table of Contents in your Presentation?
How to Give a Presentation When You Are Not Prepared?
A Quick Guide to Using Animations and Transitions in PowerPoint

Image Credit for the Featured Image

How to Make an Engaging Slide Deck (+ Example & Templates)

Learn how to create a slide deck step-by-step. Get tips, examples, and templates to make a slide deck presentation that stands out beyond any PowerPoint.

7 minute read

helped business professionals at:

Short answer

How to make a slide deck in 7 easy steps?

The main steps for creating a slide deck are:

Define your slide deck goals
Research your target audience
Research your topic
Prioritize what you want to say
Write your slide deck narrative
Create or collect visuals that support your narrative
Use a template to set up your slide deck design
Bonus: Use an AI slide deck generator to do it all for you

Most slide decks bore the audience because they fail to tell a story

Imagine standing in front of an audience, only to watch their attention fade as you click through slide after slide. It's a disheartening experience, and it's more common than you might think.

The truth is, a slide deck without a clear narrative will bore your audience and leave your message unheard.

Worse than that, a storyless slide deck may leave people disappointed and feeling like they wasted their time. And you probably wouldn’t want such feelings to reflect on you.

But a good story makes your slide deck memorable, enjoyable, and perceived as more valuable by your audience. This is the power of a good story, and this is what this post will teach you to harness.

Let me show you the techniques to turn your presentations into compelling narratives . Learn the process, get insights, and tips, and grab a slide deck template to get you started.

Let's dive in!

Common mistakes to avoid when creating a slide deck

Here's a rundown of common mistakes to avoid when creating a slide deck as shared by Dan Zedek , a professor of journalism and media innovation at Northwestern University:

Overloading with visuals: Feeling insecure about visual talent often leads to overloading slides with too many photos, irrelevant images, colors, or typefaces. Simplicity adds clarity.

Long slide duration: A slide that stays up for 5 or 6 minutes can cause the audience's mind to wander. Aim for 30 seconds to a minute per slide to keep engagement high.

Irrelevant animations and colors: Using animations and colors that don't serve the content can be distracting. Use them sparingly and consistently to highlight important concepts.

Ignoring the audience: Understanding who's in the audience and what they expect from your presentation is key. Tailor the contents of your presentation to resonate with them.

Reading from the slide: This is considered one of the worst sins in slide presentations. Your slides should complement your speech, not repeat it.

Lack of pacing: Research shows that people's patience lasts about 6 or 7 minutes. Pacing your presentation and breaking down big ideas into smaller pieces can keep the audience engaged throughout.

Failure to inject personality: You're not just presenting facts; you're telling a story. Let your personality shine through, whether it's your authority, humor, or passion for the subject.

How to prepare for creating a slide deck?

The difference between a forgettable slide deck and a memorable one lies in the groundwork you do before you sit down to build the slide deck.

In the words of Nancy Duarte , the author of the book “slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations”: “Audience interest is directly proportionate to the presenter's preparation. You better spend time and energy on any presentations where the stakes are high.

An audience can tell how much energy you spent on your presentation, which is a reflection of how much you valued their time.

If they gave you an hour of their time, you need to make it worth it to them by treating their time as a valuable asset by making the content valuable to them.”

Here's a guide to laying that foundation for a slide deck that not only informs but engages:

1. Define your slide deck goals

What's the aim of your presentation? Are you looking to educate, convince, engage, or motivate? Pinpointing your goal is like setting your GPS; it guides everything that follows.

2. Research your target audience

Understanding your audience's needs, expectations, and pain points allows you to tailor your message. Speak their language, address their concerns, and you'll capture their attention from the first slide.

3. Research your topic extensively

Dive into your subject with the curiosity of a child and the diligence of a detective. This depth of understanding will shine through in your presentation, building credibility and allowing you to address questions and objections with confidence.

4. Choose the right delivery format

Most slide decks are delivered using the PowerPoint slide format, a common 9:16 ratio that we all know. This includes presentations made with tools like Google Slides and Canva. You may even think this is the ONLY way.

But the ppt slide format is a bad format for engagement. It’s static, limited in space, and prone to all the common slide deck mistakes .

On the one hand, a static slide deck is the most common and recognized format, which makes it “safe”. But the fact it’s recognizable also makes it indistinguishable and boring.

On the other hand, an interactive slide deck invites your audience to explore with you, turning the presentation into a conversation.

Which deck would be more likely to get your attention, the static or the interactive one?

How to organize the contents of your slide deck?

A slide deck's effectiveness isn't just about the content; it's about how that content is organized.

The way you structure your slide deck can mean the difference between your audience walking away with valuable insights or leaving halfway into your presentation.

Here’s how to organize the contents of your deck for maximum impact:

1. Prioritize what you want to say

The reality is that people forget 90% of what you present after 48 hours , and the 10% they do remember is often random.

So, how can you control that crucial 10%? By prioritizing your content, focusing on the key messages that align with your goals, and crafting your content to ensure that the right bits of information become part of that vital 10% that sticks.

2. Build anticipation

Engage your audience's natural curiosity by leveraging information gap theory . Create intentional gaps in your narrative, pose questions, and hint at answers to come.

It's like leaving breadcrumbs along the path, guiding your audience through your narrative and keeping them hungry for more.

3. Create a slide deck narrative

Humans think in stories; we relate to them, and we remember them. The secret to an engaging slide deck is using a storytelling structure.

If it's a business presentation, follow with an execution plan, and close with clear next steps. The storytelling framework helps your audience flow through your slide deck like a good book.

Here’s our recommended storyline structure:

How to write a presentation storyline that creates interest

How to design your slide deck for engagement

If you want to design your slide deck for engagement, think beyond text.

Create original visuals that breathe life into data. Complement your words with multimedia elements like images and videos. Incorporate interactivity and narrated design to transform a monologue into a conversation.

5 magical steps to create your best-ever slide deck

Creating a slide deck that stands out might seem like a complex task, but with AI as your creative companion and a clear roadmap to follow, it turns into a seamless and magical experience.

Here's how you can breathe life into your ideas and make a captivating slide deck with a few easy steps:

1. Tell our AI about your presentation goals

Begin by telling our AI assistant about the slide deck you wish to create. This first step sets the tone, allowing the AI to align with your goals and craft the perfect content structure.

2. Introduce yourself and your brand

Briefly share details about yourself, your company, and the topic of your presentation. This personal touch helps the AI fine-tune the content, making your slide deck resonate with your audience.

Introduce yourself to Storydoc's AI assistant

3. Select your slide deck design and style

Choose a design that reflects your brand. Our AI assistant will take it from there, crafting a deck that's visually cohesive and appealing.

4. Customize your slide deck

Add your text and design touches, and let the AI adapt the design to your content. You can also use it to enhance your copy, brainstorm ideas, or even generate original visuals.

Customizable Storydoc multimedia presentation

5. Review and refine your slide deck

Take a final look and make any last-minute changes. If any tweaks are needed after sending, no worries—you can still make them. Your deck lives online, so you're in control of the version your audience sees, always.

How to personalize your slide deck

In the world of presentations, personalization is the magic ingredient that turns a standard slide deck into an engaging dialogue.

It's the subtle art of making each viewer feel like you're speaking directly to them, understanding their unique needs and interests.

But how can you achieve this level of personal connection? Here’s how you can do it with Storydoc -

3 steps for easy slide deck personalization:

Add information about your prospect: Add names and company details with a simple click. Your audience will receive a deck that feels crafted just for them, enhancing engagement.

Add dynamic variables: Using dynamic variables, you can address your reader by name throughout the presentation, turning it into a personalized conversation.

Advanced: Integrate Storydoc with your CRM: Storydoc seamlessly integrates with your CRM, allowing you to pull information directly into your decks. It's personalization at scale.

how to make a good personalized presentation slide

How to measure the effectiveness of your slide deck

Measuring the success of a slide deck goes beyond numbers; it's also about understanding the connection you've made with your audience. It's about knowing what resonates, what inspires, and what lingers in the minds of those you've reached.

Every slide deck created with Storydoc comes with an analytics panel that provides real-time insights -

Are viewers spending time on the slides that contain your key points? Who are they sharing your presentation with? Are they taking the next step, like visiting your website to learn more or looking through your portfolio?

By understanding how your audience interacts with your content, you can turn a standard presentation into a powerful tool for connection and influence.

Here’s a quick video showing how it works:

Slide deck templates

While following best practices is essential, standing out requires something more. It requires going from static to interactive, and from fact-led to story-led slide decks.

But interactive storytelling slide deck templates are hard to come by. Or at least they used to be.

Below you have designed templates that will make your next presentation something to remember.

Hi, I'm Dominika, Content Specialist at Storydoc. As a creative professional with experience in fashion, I'm here to show you how to amplify your brand message through the power of storytelling and eye-catching visuals.

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Home Blog Design How to Create a Slide Deck in PowerPoint

How to Create a Slide Deck in PowerPoint

A commonly used term when working with presentations is “slide deck,” but what exactly do we mean by that? Should you be familiar with some core terms before making your first presentation?

As we believe continuous education is key for presenters, regardless of their presentation skill level, today, we will talk about presentation deck meaning, how to build a presentation deck, and which elements define success in this process. Additionally, for a broader understanding and skill enhancement in making effective presentations, our section on how to make a presentation offers valuable insights and practical tips. Without further ado, let’s get started!

Table of Contents

What is a Slide?

What is a slide deck, what should be included in a powerpoint slide deck, recommended slide decks for any kind of presentation.

A PowerPoint slide can be defined as a digital canvas in which we organize information and ideas in a visual format, primarily oriented for professional settings like business presentations, conferences, or academic presentations. People instantly associate slides with PowerPoint due to Microsoft PowerPoint being the industry-leading software in presentation software, offering full compatibility format with free software options like Google Slides.

The starting point of any slide is a blank canvas to which you can add a title, and you’ve got plenty of space to insert images, draw shapes, add videos to your presentations, and more. PowerPoint has a standard layout for its blank slides, as shown below. This layout can be modified by accessing Slide Master in PowerPoint .

Each slide is a single page of a presentation and can be edited to meet the requirements of any presenter without meaning you alter the following slides. Remember, presentation software tends to work with destructive workflow methodologies – meaning the changes you make cannot be reverted if you save the file and try to access it later. If you want to test multiple design options on a single slide, we highly recommend you create individual slides for each design or even save them as different file names so you can revert to a previous stage without inconvenience.

A slide deck or PPT deck is a collection of slides curated for a sole purpose: serving as visual aids for a presentation topic. These slides can contain multiple tools like charts and graphs , placeholder text areas, icons, dashboard display, illustrations (in the format of vector images), and way more depending on three key elements:

Build quality: How much effort the creator put into crafting the slides.
Software: Although compatible, PowerPoint decks may offer some effects that aren’t available in Google Slides. For that reason, creators often flag animated slides or slide decks containing complex shadow effects as only PowerPoint-compatible.
Topic: A presentation deck intended to present a marketing plan won’t contain the same elements as one intended to deliver a motivational talk.

Before deciding how to start a presentation , select a slide deck compatible with the topic your presentation is geared toward.

We like to work with the method of using one topic per slide. This means not overpopulating your slides with content for the sake of showing content. Such practices affect readability and the overall understanding of your presentation.

Instead, we will teach you how to curate content in your slide decks by taking pitch deck templates as an example.

Say we select the Executive Pitch Deck PowerPoint Template . This pitch deck is intended to introduce potential investors to what the business is about.

Structure of a professional presentation deck in PowerPoint

Rather than filling all the data in just 2-3 slides, take it easy and work with the layout this template offers:

Title Slide: Every single presentation should list a title slide, with quality graphics and the presentation title being clear enough. Additional information can include the presenter’s name, the company’s name, logo, etc.
About Us Slide: In business environments, companies should always introduce themselves, highlighting key information like the industry they move in, significant milestones, etc. Remember, this is an introduction to the company as an entity, not a description of your team members.
Best Services: Depending on your niche, take this as an opportunity to promote your core activities as a company.
What We Do: This is complementary to “Best Services.” It is the section where you specify which areas your company covers and why your services stand out against competitors.
Mission and Vision: Required for any pitch deck presentation.
Meet the Team: This slide can either be an org chart or be presented through photos for the managers per department (the interaction points between stakeholders and management).
Our Advantages: Ideal to complement slides 3 and 4, this expresses the competitive advantage of the company and marketing plan, and you should present your flagship product or service.
Market Opportunity: What led your company to approach its niche, attending to customers’ pain points.
Timeline: This slide serves to introduce significant milestones, projects, planned strategies, deadlines, etc.
Market Size: When we have to answer the total addressable market (TAM), we can use a slide representing TAM, SAM, and SOM .
Competitors: Two slides in this presentation deck talk about a company’s competitors and different approaches to representing that data with visual impact.
Data Chart: If you intend to discuss a KPI in particular, this chart slide can work to expand the talk over that point.
Product and Demo: This works either for e-commerce or physical products. Presenters can alter the slide to discuss services rather than products or just keep the “Best Services” slide.
Pricing Slide: When discussing a business pitch, you must present your current pricing range to potential investors. In this case, the slide resembles the pricing tier format you can find on many websites.
Thank You Slide: Knowing how to end a presentation with class is critical to securing a business deal. You can include a photo that resembles closing a business deal, a video that further expands your company’s history, products/services, and culture, or leave it with a minimalistic “thank you.”

With just 15 slides, you can create a powerful slide deck communicating your message to your target audience. Keeping a clean layout and following the 1 topic per slide rule ensures your presentation delivers a clean speech.

Now, we’ll move on to how to make a presentation deck from scratch. We recommend working with PowerPoint Templates , as design decisions are already taken for you (font pairing, color schemes, placeholder areas, balance between text and graphs).

Select a Slide Deck

By browsing professional PPT template creators’ websites like SlideModel, you can find a vast selection of products tailored to your needs. It is as easy as to browse for the topic you want via the search bar, locate a product you desire, and download it to your account. You can also explore the available products per category through menu elements.

Insert your Content

Every single presentation deck available at SlideModel.com is entirely customizable. We can add illustrations by going to Insert > Picture and selecting the origin from which you want to upload your image into the presentation.

Also, users can customize the template and replace the image in the placeholder area by right-clicking over it and selecting Change Picture .

Access Change Picture in PowerPoint via contextual menu

Text content can be edited in the text placeholder areas by clicking over it. Charts and graphs may require some extra steps depending on how they were crafted. To replace the placeholder data, simply select the chart or graph element and click on the Filter option next to it. Seek the Select Data option at the end of the contextual menu.

Modify the data used as a sample in the chart with the information pertinent to your company or project. An MS Excel spreadsheet will open up to allow that procedure.

What are the key elements of an effective slide deck?

A clear and cohesive theme, concise and impactful text, and high-quality graphics are all you need to create a powerful slide deck, as long as it follows a logical flow that guides the audience through the presentation.

Can I create a slide deck if I don’t have Microsoft PowerPoint?

Yes, our expertise in this field tells us there are no visible differences between working with PowerPoint and Google Slides or Apple Keynote to create a quality presentation, except for some curved text effects and complex animations.

What are some tips for choosing a theme or template for my slide deck?

Select a theme or template that aligns with the presentation’s topic or audience.
Consider the context and setting of the presentation.
Opt for a clean and professional design that backs up your speech rather than add distracting elements.

How can I add and format text on my slides?

When working with presentation software, you can format text as you would work with any text editor. Remember to stick to concise and clear language, with no technical jargon. Huge “text walls” deter the audience from your talk, as there’s a natural impulse to read the content. Opt for legible fonts rather than complex script typefaces.

How can I ensure my slides are consistent regarding fonts, colors, and styles?

Using a consistent color scheme is the first step, which can be analogous (easier to work), complementary, or bolder options as long as you stick to recommended color pairings. Avoid harsh contrasts, as they make your slides less legible. Use a maximum of 3 different fonts in your slide, best if 2 only.

1. Innovative Business Presentation Template Slide Deck

Powerful graphics with contrasting tones that add a vibrant vibe to your presentation. This slide deck is ideal for startups, tech talks, or any presentation that wants to showcase a vanguard style in touch with the latest design trends.

Use This Template

2. PPT Slide Deck Template

A semi-formal slide deck that balances many visual aids and placeholder text areas while bearing a complementary color scheme. Ideal for team meetings, introducing your company to investors, or academic presentations.

3. Business Executive Presentation Deck for PowerPoint

Sleek, formal, and with plenty of tools to repurpose this slide deck for multiple presentation requirements. A fully editable PPT presentation deck that can accommodate an alternative theme to its distinctive cool blue executive tones.

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Presentation Deck Meaning: What is a PPT deck?

The easiest way to understand the presentation deck meaning is that it is a set of slides put together in the form of a presentation, usually for business purposes but also often used in other areas like academic environments or public speaking events. The term “deck” derives from the old analog technology by which a physical set of semitransparent slides (the deck) was placed inside a projector that shone light throw them. That is the root of the slide deck meaning.

These old projectors were later replaced by presentation software and digital projectors, but the term stuck. Microsoft PowerPoint has been one of the most widely known presentation deck tools since its release in 1987. Since then, a deck presentation has almost been a synonym for a PowerPoint deck.

A PPT deck quickly became the industry standard to present information due to Microsoft’s mainstream commercial success in the following decades. Apple products were still considered to target a niche in the market then, and their slide deck software, Keynote, would never harness the massive popularity of PowerPoint decks.

A Power Point deck is one of the most effective ways to navigate different topics, from all-hands meetings to investor presentations. The human brain struggles to remember a lengthy or complicated topic when you are presenting. In equal measure, your audience needs smaller bites of information they can process more easily and effectively.

A slide deck is also one of the most popular ways to introduce a business in a fundraising process in what’s commonly known as a pitch deck, or investor deck. These 15-20 slide decks help tell the story of startups and small businesses, what their value proposition is, and what their companies expect to achieve by raising money.

You can check out our pitch deck templates gallery here.

Regardless of the topic for which it is used, a deck presentation should follow storytelling best practices:

It should tell a story in a way that makes it easy for the audience to understand and follow
A good presentation deck typically builds momentum toward the last third of the slides, usually called the climax of your presentation
Slides on your deck should not tell everything you wish to communicate. The focus should always be on you and the valuable information outside the presentation you possess
The best decks are the ones that help guide the speaker but don’t get in the way of their message. One could argue that the slides are mainly for the sake of the presenter
When it comes to slide deck presentations, less is definitely more. The more visual and concise the slides are, the better

Hopefully, this short guide will help you understand the deck presentation meaning and will work as a starting point to build your next presentation.

Upgrade your presentation with expertly designed slides. Our consulting and design services offer visually stunning and functional solutions that can take your deck to the next level.

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35+ Best Pitch Deck Examples from Successful Startups (2024 Update with Editable Templates Included)

The Startup Financial Model Template by Slidebean

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The Best 35 Pitch Decks for 2023: Templates for for Startups

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A pitch deck is the standard document used by startups to present their case to investors; it’s a brief deck of about 10 to 20 slides. See examples here.

Learn how to create a compelling slide deck for your startup. Explore how to use slide decks as aids for your presentation, and the most common uses for them.

This is a functional model you can use to create your own formulas and project your potential business growth. Instructions on how to use it are on the front page.

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It’s 1948, and it isn’t a great year for alcohol. Prohibition has come and gone, and booze is a buyer’s market again. That much is obvious from Seagram’s annual sales meeting, an 11-city traveling extravaganza designed to drum up nationwide sales. No expense has been spared: there’s the two-hour, professionally acted stage play about the life of a whiskey salesman. The beautiful anteroom displays. The free drinks. But the real highlight is a slideshow.

To call the Seagram-Vitarama a slideshow is an understatement. It’s an experience : hundreds of images of the distilling process, set to music, projected across five 40-by-15-foot screens. “It is composed of pictures, yet it is not static,” comments one awed witness. “The overall effect is one of magnificence.” Inspired by an Eastman Kodak exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair, the Seagram-Vitarama is the first A/V presentation ever given at a sales meeting. It will not be the last.

In the late ’40s, multimedia was a novelty. But by the early 1960s, nearly all companies with national advertising budgets were using multimedia gear—16-millimeter projectors, slide projectors, filmstrip projectors, and overheads—in their sales training and promotions, for public relations, and as part of their internal communications. Many employed in-house A/V directors, who were as much showmen as technicians. Because although presentations have a reputation for being tedious, when they’re done right, they’re theater. The business world knows it. Ever since the days of the Vitarama, companies have leveraged the dramatic power of images to sell their ideas to the world.

Next slide, please

The sound of slides clacking is deafening. But it doesn’t matter, because the champagne is flowing and the sound system is loud. The 2,500 dignitaries and VIPs in the audience are being treated to an hourlong operetta about luxury travel. Onstage, a massive chorus, the entire Stockholm Philharmonic, and some 50 dancers and performers are fluttering around a pair of Saab 9000CD sedans. Stunning images of chrome details, leather seats, and open roads dance across a 26-foot-tall screen behind them. The images here are all analog: nearly 7,000 film slides, carefully arranged in a grid of 80 Kodak projectors. It’s 1987, and slideshows will never get any bigger than this.

Before PowerPoint, and long before digital projectors, 35-millimeter film slides were king. Bigger, clearer, and less expensive to produce than 16-millimeter film, and more colorful and higher-resolution than video, slides were the only medium for the kinds of high-impact presentations given by CEOs and top brass at annual meetings for stockholders, employees, and salespeople. Known in the business as “multi-image” shows, these presentations required a small army of producers, photographers, and live production staff to pull off. First the entire show had to be written, storyboarded, and scored. Images were selected from a library, photo shoots arranged, animations and special effects produced. A white-gloved technician developed, mounted, and dusted each slide before dropping it into the carousel. Thousands of cues were programmed into the show control computers—then tested, and tested again. Because computers crash. Projector bulbs burn out. Slide carousels get jammed.

“When you think of all the machines, all the connections, all the different bits and pieces, it’s a miracle these things even played at all,” says Douglas Mesney , a commercial photographer turned slide producer whose company Incredible Slidemakers produced the 80-projector Saab launch. Now 77 years old, he’s made a retirement project of archiving the now-forgotten slide business. Mesney pivoted to producing multi-image shows in the early 1970s after an encounter with an impressive six-screen setup at the 1972 New York Boat Show. He’d been shooting spreads for Penthouse and car magazines, occasionally lugging a Kodak projector or two to pitch meetings for advertising clients. “All of a sudden you look at six projectors and what they can do, and you go, Holy mackerel ,” he remembers.

“All of a sudden you look at six projectors and what they can do, and you go, Holy mackerel. ” Douglas Mesney, a commercial photographer

Six was just the beginning. At the height of Mesney's career, his shows called for up to 100 projectors braced together in vertiginous rigs. With multiple projectors pointing toward the same screen, he could create seamless panoramas and complex animations, all synchronized to tape. Although the risk of disaster was always high, when he pulled it off, his shows dazzled audiences and made corporate suits look like giants. Mesney’s clients included IKEA, Saab, Kodak, and Shell; he commanded production budgets in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. And in the multi-image business, that was cheap. Larger A/V staging companies, like Carabiner International, charged up to $1 million to orchestrate corporate meetings, jazzing up their generic multi-image “modules” with laser light shows, dance numbers, and top-shelf talent like Hall & Oates, the Allman Brothers, and even the Muppets. “I liken it to being a rock-and-roll roadie, but I never went on the tour bus,” explains Susan Buckland, a slide programmer who spent most of her career behind the screen at Carabiner.

From its incorporation in 1976 to the mid-1980s, the Association for Multi-Image, a trade association for slide producers, grew from zero to 5,000 members. At its peak, the multi-image business employed some 20,000 people and supported several festivals and four different trade magazines. One of these ran a glowing profile of Douglas Mesney in 1980; when asked for his prognosis about the future of slides, he replied: “We could make a fortune or be out of business in a year.” He wasn’t wrong.

At the time, some 30 manufacturers of electronic slide programming devices vied for the multi-image dollar. To meet the demand for high-impact shows, the tech had quickly evolved from manual dissolve units and basic control systems—programmed with punched paper tape, and then audiocassette—to dedicated slide control computers like the AVL Eagle I, which could drive 30 projectors at once. The Eagle, which came with word processing and accounting software, was a true business computer—so much so that when Eagle spun off from its parent company, Audio Visual Labs, in the early ’80s, it became one of Silicon Valley’s most promising computer startups. Eagle went public in the summer of 1983, making its president, Dennis R. Barnhart, an instant multimillionaire. Only hours after the IPO, Barnhart plowed his brand-new cherry-red Ferrari through a guardrail near the company’s headquarters in Los Gatos, California, flipped through the air, crashed into a ravine, and died. The slide business would soon follow.

Douglas Mesney likes to say that if you never saw a slide show, you never will. The machines to show them have been landfilled. The slides themselves were rarely archived. Occasionally a few boxes containing an old multi-image “module” will turn up in a storage unit, and occasionally those will even be undamaged. But with the exception of a few hobbyists and retired programmers, the know-how to restore and stage multi-image slideshows is scarce. This leaves former slide professionals at a loss. “All of us are devastated that none of the modules survived,” says Susan Buckland. “Basically, I don’t have a past, because I can’t explain it.” The entire industry, which existed at an unexpected intersection of analog and high-tech artistry, came and went in a little over 20 years.

Presentations, like porn, have always pushed technology forward; in the multi-image days, producers like Mesney took the slide as far as it could go, using every tool available to create bigger and bolder shows. Mesney claims to have set the land speed record for a slide presentation with a three-minute-long, 2,400-slide show, but even at top speed, slides are static. The computers that controlled them, however, were not—and it wasn’t long before they evolved beyond the medium. “Back then, computers were fast enough to tell slides what to do, but they weren’t fast enough to actually create the images themselves,” explains Steven Michelsen, a former slide programmer who restores and runs old multi-image shows in his Delaware garage. “It took another 10 or 15 years until you could run a show straight from your computer and have the images look worth looking at,” he adds.

The last slide projector ever made rolled off the assembly line in 2004. The inside of its casing was signed by factory workers and Kodak brass before the unit was handed over to the Smithsonian. Toasts and speeches were made, but by then they were eulogies, because PowerPoint had already eaten the world.

Inventing PowerPoint

The Hotel Regina is an Art Nouveau marvel overlooking the Tuileries Garden and the Louvre. But on this day in 1992, its Old World meeting rooms have been retrofitted with advanced video technology. The color projector in the back of the room, the size of a small refrigerator, cost upwards of $100,000 and takes an hour to warm up. A team of technicians has spent the better part of the last 48 hours troubleshooting to ensure that nothing goes wrong when Robert Gaskins, the fastidious architect of a new piece of software called PowerPoint 3.0, walks into the room. He’ll be carrying a laptop under his arm, and when he reaches the lectern, he’ll pick up a video cable, plug it in, and demonstrate for the first time something that has been reproduced billions of times since: a video presentation, running straight off a laptop, in full color. The audience, full of Microsoft associates from across Europe, will go bananas. They “grasped immediately what the future would bring for their own presentations,” Gaskins later wrote. “There was deafening applause.”

It’s hard now to imagine deafening applause for a PowerPoint—almost as hard as it is to imagine anyone but Bob Gaskins standing at this particular lectern, ushering in the PowerPoint age. Presentations are in his blood. His father ran an A/V company, and family vacations usually included a trip to the Eastman Kodak factory. During his graduate studies at Berkeley, he tinkered with machine translation and coded computer-generated haiku. He ran away to Silicon Valley to find his fortune before he could finalize his triple PhDs in English, linguistics, and computer science, but he brought with him a deep appreciation for the humanities, staffing his team with like-minded polyglots, including a disproportionately large number of women in technical roles. Because Gaskins ensured that his offices—the only Microsoft division, at the time, in Silicon Valley—housed a museum-worthy art collection, PowerPoint’s architects spent their days among works by Frank Stella, Richard Diebenkorn, and Robert Motherwell.

a grid of slides from using computer graphics

Gaskins’s 1984 proposal for PowerPoint, written when he was VP of product development at the Sunnyvale startup Forethought, is a manifesto in bullet points. It outlines the slumbering, largely-hidden-from-view $3.5 billion business presentation industry and its enormous need for clear, effective slides. It lists technology trends—laser printers, color graphics, “WYSIWYG” software—that point to an emerging desktop presentation market. It’s a stunningly prescient document throughout. But Gaskins italicized only one bullet point in the whole thing.

User benefits:

Allows the content-originator to control the presentation.

This is Gaskins’s key insight: a presentation’s message is inevitably diluted when its production is outsourced. In the early ’80s, he meant that literally. The first two versions of PowerPoint were created to help executives produce their own overhead transparencies and 35-millimeter slides, rather than passing the job off to their secretaries or a slide bureau.

PowerPoint had become shorthand for the stupefying indignities of office life—a 2001 New Yorker profile summed it up as “software you impose on other people.”

“In the ’50s, ’60s, and early ’70s, information flow was narrow,” explains Sandy Beetner, former CEO of Genigraphics, a business graphics company that was, for several decades, the industry leader in professional presentation graphics. Their clients were primarily Fortune 500 companies and government agencies with the resources to produce full-color charts, 3D renderings, and other high-tech imagery on those slides. Everyone else was limited to acetate overheads and— gasp —words. “Prior to PowerPoint,” she says, “people communicated in black and white. There was just so much missed in that environment.”

Beetner oversaw Genigraphics’ national network service bureaus, which were located in every major American city and staffed 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, by graphic artists prepared to produce, polish, and print slides. The company was so vital to presentational culture that Gaskins negotiated a deal to make Genigraphics the official 35-millimeter slide production service for PowerPoint 2.0; a “Send to Genigraphics” menu command was baked into PowerPoint until 2003. This, incidentally, was around the same time that Kodak stopped making Carousel projectors.

slides set next to each other showing in total the scene of an airplane on the tarmac

Gaskins retired from Microsoft in 1993 and moved to London. He returned to the States 10 years later, an expert in antique concertinas. By then, PowerPoint had become shorthand for the stupefying indignities of office life. A 2001 New Yorker profile summed it up as “software you impose on other people”; the statistician Edward Tufte, known for his elegant monographs about data visualization, famously blamed the 2003 Columbia shuttle disaster on a bum PowerPoint slide. Gaskins’s software, Tufte argued, produces relentlessly sequential, hierarchical, sloganeering, over-managed presentations, rife with “chartjunk” and devoid of real meaning. No wonder software corporations loved it.

Robert Gaskins is remarkably sympathetic to these views, not least because Tufte’s mother, the Renaissance scholar Virginia Tufte, mentored him as an undergraduate in the English department at the University of Southern California. In a reflection written on the 20th anniversary of PowerPoint’s introduction, Gaskins acknowledged that “more business and academic talks look like poor attempts at sales presentations,” a phenomenon he blamed as much on a “mass failure of taste” as on PowerPoint itself, a tool so powerful it collapsed all preexisting contexts. Not everything’s a sales presentation; nor should it be. But PowerPoint made it easy to add multimedia effects to informal talks, empowering lay users to make stylistic decisions once reserved for professionals. To paraphrase an early PowerPoint print ad: now the person making the presentation made the presentation. That those people weren’t always particularly good at it didn’t seem to matter.

What did matter was that presentations were no longer reserved for year-end meetings and big ideas worthy of the effort and expense required to prepare color slides. “The scalability of information and audience that PowerPoint brought to the party was pretty incredible,” says Beetner, whose company has survived as a ghost in the machine, in the form of PowerPoint templates and clip art. “It opened up the channels dramatically, and pretty quickly. There isn’t a student alive, at any level, that hasn’t seen a PowerPoint presentation.” Indeed, PowerPoint is used in religious sermons; by schoolchildren preparing book reports; at funerals and weddings. In 2010, Microsoft announced that PowerPoint was installed on more than a billion computers worldwide.

At this scale, PowerPoint’s impact on how the world communicates has been immeasurable. But here’s something that can be measured: Microsoft grew tenfold in the years that Robert Gaskins ran its Graphics Business Unit, and it has grown 15-fold since. Technology corporations, like PowerPoint itself, have exploded. And so have their big presentations, which are no longer held behind closed doors. They’re now semi-public affairs, watched—willingly and enthusiastically—by consumers around the world. Nobody has to worry about slide carousels getting jammed anymore, but things still go haywire all the time, from buggy tech demos to poorly-thought-out theatrics.

When everything works, a good presentation can drive markets and forge reputations. Of course, this particular evolution wasn’t exclusively Microsoft’s doing. Because perhaps the most memorable corporate presentation of all time—Steve Jobs’s announcement of the iPhone at Macworld 2007— wasn’t a PowerPoint at all. It was a Keynote .

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Everything You Need to Know About Slide Decks

Whether it’s for a new business proposal or a school assignment, making a great presentation can be difficult. If you’ve ever Googled “how do I make a great presentation?” you may have been hit with tons of information and new lingo.

One of these new words you may have heard in association with presentations is a “slide deck.” In this article, we will go through everything you need to know about slide decks, why they are beneficial, and how you can make a great one for your next presentation!

What’s a Slide Deck?

A slide deck is a collection of slides organized together to form a cohesive presentation. Slide decks are presentation tools that allow presenters to share their ideas with an audience. The slides can be used to showcase text, images, or multimedia content.

Slide decks are typically used for presentations, but they can also be used for other purposes such as training materials or educational materials. They are a versatile tool that can be adapted to meet the needs of any situation.

What is the Difference Between a Slide Deck and a Slideshow?

When it comes to presentations, there is a lot of confusion about the difference between a slide deck and a slideshow. Both terms are often used interchangeably, but there is actually a big distinction between the two.

A slide deck is a collection of slides that are designed to be shown together as a cohesive presentation. A slideshow, on the other hand, is simply a sequence of images that are displayed one after the other.

Slide decks can be used for a variety of purposes, such as pitching an idea to investors, giving a company update to employees, or delivering a TED talk.

Slideshows, on the other hand, can be used for things like sharing vacation photos with friends and family, displaying a portfolio of work, or telling a story.

How Do You Make a Good Slide Deck?

Making a good slide deck can be the difference between a presentation that is well-received and one that falls flat. Here are some tips to help you create an effective slide deck:

1. A Strong Thesis Statement.

Your thesis should be clear and concise, and it should outline the main points you want to make in your presentation.

2. Support Your Information, Don’t Repeat it

Your slides should provide visual aids that help explain your points, not recap what you’ve already said.

3. Keep Your Slides Simple.

Too much text or too many visuals can be overwhelming for viewers. Stick to a few key points per slide, and use typography and images to convey your message.

4. Practice

It’s important to test your slide deck on family and friends before giving your presentation in front of a live audience. This will help you identify any potential problems and make necessary adjustments.

When crafting a presentation, it helps to do some research into exactly what makes a good presentation. Some of that comes from understanding the lingo associated with presentations, like a slide deck. If you have more questions about slide decks and how to make a great presentation, contact Kristian Olson Art and Design .

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Jar of questions asking what is the difference between powerpoint vs slide deck

PowerPoint Vs. Slide Deck, Slide Deck Meaning & More Simple Terms

Whitney D. Walter

Introduction

The terms “PowerPoint” and “slide deck” are thrown around a lot in the business world. So much so that you might be wondering if they mean the same thing or if there is something inherently different between the two.

The most significant distinction between a PowerPoint and a deck is that a “deck” is simply a collection of slides, whereas the term “PowerPoint” often refers to the final presentation which may be delivered in the form of a speech, video, or other format.

Here are a few examples of how a PowerPoint presentation can be used:

How do you make a good slide deck in powerpoint, what is a slide deck called in google slides, what is microsoft powerpoint.

Let’s start with the basics. Microsoft PowerPoint is a digital presentation tool. It’s a software application that allows users to share information and ideas with others.

Creating an informational slideshow to share with colleagues or clients. This might include information about a new product, project details, or company updates.
Developing a presentation to deliver at a conference or other professional event. This could include sharing research findings, pitching a business idea, or promoting a new initiative.
Creating an educational resource, such as a lesson plan or study guide. This might include slides with information about a topic, along with accompanying questions or activities.
Designing a sales deck to use when meeting with potential customers or clients. This could include slides outlining the features and benefits of a product or service.

PowerPoint presentations can be created using a variety of methods, including importing images, adding text, and inserting multimedia content.

Anatomy of a PowerPoint

What is a PowerPoint presentation?

You can think of a PowerPoint presentation as a vehicle to share information with others. Some people refer to a presentation as the act of actually presenting a slide deck. This can be in the form of a recorded slideshow, speech, or another delivery method.

Others may refer to presentations simply as the completed Powerpoint deck.

A typical PowerPoint presentation consists of a series of slides, each of which can contain text , images, and other multimedia content. PowerPoint also offers a variety of features, such as animations and transitions, that can help to make your presentation more engaging.

What is a PowerPoint slide deck?

A slide deck is simply a collection of slides. It can be created using PowerPoint or any other presentation software application, like Google Slides.

However, a key difference between a PowerPoint presentation and a slide deck is that a slide deck is not necessarily intended to be presented in a linear fashion. Instead, a slide deck can be used as a reference tool or resource, or it can be presented in a non-linear fashion, such as through an interactive website or app.

Why is it called a slide deck?

At this point, you might be wondering “But why are PowerPoints called decks?”. The term “slide deck” is derived from the old days of presentations when slides were physical transparencies that were loaded into a carousel and projected onto a screen.

These physical slides would be shuffled around to create the presentation, much like a deck of cards. Thus, the term “slide deck” was born.

In modern times, slide decks are usually presented electronically, either as a PowerPoint presentation or as a PDF. However, the term slide deck has stuck and is still used to refer to a presentation, even though there may not be any physical slides involved.

Why should you use PowerPoint slide decks?

A slide deck is an important tool for any presenter. It allows you to organize your thoughts and present them in a visually appealing way.

A well-designed slide deck can engage your audience and help you deliver your message effectively.

Is a deck the same as a PowerPoint?

Honestly, you will hear the terms “deck”, “presentation”, and “PowerPoint” used interchangeably in business settings.

The key difference between a presentation and a deck is that a deck is a collection of slides and a PowerPoint presentation could be given in the form of a speech, video, or other formats.

What is a PowerPoint slide?

A PowerPoint slide is a digital version of a traditional slide that is used to convey information during a presentation.

Unlike a traditional slide, which is typically created using a physical projector and an overhead transparency, a PowerPoint slide is created using software such as Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple Keynote. PowerPoint slides can be shared electronically with others via email or through

Simply put, consider each slide to be a digital page in your overall story.

What is the difference between a slide and a slide deck?

A slide is an individual page in a presentation deck while a slide deck is an entire presentation.

Each slide typically contains one main idea that contributes to the overall message presented with the slide deck.

At this point, you might be wondering how to make a good slide deck.

Here are a few quick tips:

Start with a strong title slide that will grab attention and set the tone for the rest of the presentation.
Be sure to include an agenda slide so your audience knows what to expect during the presentation. This helps with audience engagement.
Use clean slide designs that are easy to read and understand.
Try to limit each slide to one main point. Use images and graphics to support these points and tell the story.
End with a strong conclusion that recaps what you covered, includes a call-to-action, provides relevant resources, and leaves your audience with a positive impression.

Creating a great slide deck takes time and effort, but it’s worth it. A well-designed slide deck can help you deliver a powerful presentation that will inform your audience and inspire them to take action.

What’s the difference between a slide deck and pitch deck?

As we discussed, a slide deck is a collection of slides. The topic of these slides can be nearly anything under the sun.

A pitch deck is also a collection of multiple slides but the main difference is that all the slides are meant to serve a very specific business-related purpose.

The main idea behind pitch decks is typically to gain interest from investors. This is done by showcasing the potential of your business idea and/or product.

So while a slide deck can be about anything, a pitch deck will always cover information that will be of interest to potential business stakeholders.

group of people using different laptops like keynote on apple and powerpoint on windows

The term “slide deck” is also used in reference to other presentation software like Google Slides and Apple’s Keynote .

Now that you know the difference between a PowerPoint presentation and a slide deck, you know that they are powerful tools that can be used to deliver effective presentations and engage your audience.

What tips do you have for creating effective slide decks? How have you used slide decks in your own presentations or business communications? Leave a comment and let me know!

Whitney is a recognized Professional Development Expert, professional speaker, and the founder of Harness Your Power. She holds a Master’s in Business Administration from Florida State University and a Microsoft PowerPoint Specialist certification. She has been featured in Yahoo Finance, AOL, Authority Magazine, Business Insider, Fox and more. Read more.

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Creating a slide deck for any occasion.

Make a slide deck that shows off your ideas, holds your audience’s attention, and even entertains them.

Collage of different presentation slides

Remember that you’re telling a story.

Whether you’re presenting a pitch deck, leading a webinar, or simply sharing your ideas with your team, keep in mind that humans naturally think in terms of narrative. In fact, neuroscientists have discovered that listening to a story can activate all parts of the brain and even lead to changes in behavior. As a presenter, you can take advantage of this human quirk. By sharing a story with a beginning, middle, and end, a presenter draws in audience members and stirs their emotions. Showing sales numbers to potential investors will be more effective when it’s part of a presentation that weaves a compelling narrative. Creating a slideshow highlighting important data can help you relay the high points of a dense report to your employees. No matter the information, before you start thinking about specific presentation slides, ask yourself what story you want to tell. Who is your audience and how do you want them to respond?

A professional presentation in three acts.

Present your story as a classic three-act play with your audience as the hero. What do they want? What obstacles must they overcome to achieve their goal? Begin with the first obstacle, and build a little suspense before you offer the solution. You might tell a smaller story about facing that obstacle, giving it a place in the larger narrative. Then move onto the next obstacle and do the same.

In the second act, present your solution to the problem. What is it and how does it work? How will it successfully help your heroes reach their goal?

In the final act, your narrative ends with the audience getting what it needs: resolution. Their problem is solved with the help of your solution or product, and maybe something extra — like a problem they haven’t even anticipated — is also solved. Once you’ve filled in the details of this basic structure, you’re ready to start making slides.

Put design principles to work.

Slide design is crucial for every deck, no matter the presentation software you’re using. Working elements of visual storytelling into your entire presentation will ensure that even audience members watching on laptops stay engaged. Just follow these simple rules:

Stick to a visual theme.

A consistent look — with consistent typography and a basic color scheme — will help your audience stay focused on the content of your slides.

Keep it simple.

Avoid cluttering your deck with endless charts, tables, or bullet points too small for everyone to read. Allow for plenty of white space on each slide, so the crucial information stands out.

Find the right tools for every job.

Pie charts are great for demonstrating percentages. Vertical bar charts show changes over time better than horizontal bar charts, which are best for comparing quantities. To visually represent trends, a line chart is your best bet. You might also try creating an infographic to help your audience visualize your data or to tell a smaller story within your larger narrative.

Incorporate video or audio.

People sit up straighter and pay closer attention when you break up your static slides with video and audio. Use motion and sound to help draw your audience’s focus to your key takeaways.

Make your design elements sparkle with Adobe InDesign.

To create an impactful and entertaining presentation without starting from scratch, choose one of the many presentation templates in Adobe Stock and open it in InDesign. Then import your brand logo and other marketing assets for a consistent look.

Once you’ve got the visual theme and color palette you want, consider including surprise elements like high-quality Adobe Stock photographs, illustrations, or even movie clips to help your work really stand out. Plus, in InDesign, a simple two-step command allows you to export and preview, so you can immediately see every single slide through your audience’s eyes.

To start a presentation from scratch, follow these steps:

1. Find the right page size.

Click on File in the InDesign main menu, then New Document. A dialog box will open. If you’re not sure what dimensions to use, set the page width to 12 inches and the page height to 9 inches. Click Create and a blank page will appear.

2. Choose your background.

Remember to keep it simple, but look for a striking background image that works with text overlay. The deck’s title can also become part of the background.

3. Create paragraph styles.

Keeping it simple applies to your text too. Select no more than three text styles to keep the title font, body font, and footnote font consistent throughout the presentation. Creating paragraph styles also allows you to change font and size with a click of a button, saving you time in the long run.

4. Set up master pages.

Master pages streamline your slide design workflow and ensure your presentation looks professional and well designed. You can create one slide with three columns, one with a big background image as a transitional slide, one that highlights a customer quote — the list goes on. Add image and text frames to the master pages so you can drop your content in later without having to overthink the layout.

5. Add images and text.

Once you’ve created the master pages, it’s easy to drag and drop Photoshop (.PSD) files, PDFs, Illustrator (.AI) files, JPEGs, PNGs, or GIFs into the image frames. To add text, just copy and paste text files or select the Type Tool from the toolbar and type directly into the text frame.

6. Add page numbers.

Page numbers will help you and your audience keep track of any sequentially paged documents. To insert page numbers, select Type from the main menu, then Insert Special Character, then Markers, and finally Current Page Number. InDesign will automatically number the slides.

7. Add finishing touches.

From movies and sound clips to hyperlinks, cross references, and page transitions, you’ve got plenty of interactive options to make your story as compelling as possible.

8. Export your slide deck.

When you’ve finished creating your deck, the final step is to export it in a format that can be projected or distributed. Exporting as Adobe PDF (Interactive) lets you play or click through interactive content directly in the presentation.

To export, just click File in the main menu, then Export. From the Format dropdown menu, select Adobe PDF (Interactive), and then click Save.

Discover apps that can help you design engaging presentations.

https://main--cc--adobecom.hlx.page/cc-shared/fragments/cc-teams/resources/how-to/teams-plans

The Difference Between Presentation Slides and a Deck

Just because we may use the same tools to accomplish the creation of both presentation slides and a deck does not mean that they are the same.

However, most people will say that presentation slides and a deck are basically the same thing.

In many ways, of course, they are very similar. You do use a “slide deck” during your presentation and, in the most basic sense, presentation slides and a deck are nearly the same.

However, in our humble opinion, it is worth drawing a line of distinction between the two.

The Differences Between Presentation Slides and a Deck

First off, presentation slides and a deck have very different end goals.

If you are creating presentation slides, then you are (quite obviously) preparing materials that you will use as a visual aid during a presentation. Presentation slides should be visually stunning and minimalistic in their content. After all, if you are the one giving the presentation, you want all eyes on you, not your slides!

If you are creating a deck, you very well may be creating a series of visual slides that are meant for someone to read on their own. This means that deck slides can be more information and can generally contain a lot more content. Since a deck is meant as something that should be read, you can utilize the format to communicate a lot of information quickly.

Second, presentation slides are relatively fast to make whereas a deck may be significantly time consuming.

Assuming that you have a general outline of your speech, putting together the supporting slides should be relatively easy. You already know the main points that you want to make and you just need some great looking and simple slides to support your talking points.

There are lots of design tools out there that can help you develop engaging and beautiful graphics. If you are creating presentation slides, the best bet is to find some great looking, royalty free images on a website like Unsplash .

Creating all the content for a deck that is meant to be read can take a lot longer. The reason being that you need to be able to convey all the important information to a reader without the benefit of being able to fill in gaps with a voiceover.

Typically, this means that you will have to spend a bit more time creating the content. You have to be sure to triple check your grammar, all data points, and references.

Finally, presentation slides are truly a one way street: they are meant to be presented and consumed in a very particular order. As the presentation creator, you will have an agenda and a series of slides that follow the main topics of the presentation. It would be very unnatural for you to hop around randomly throughout the presentation because you would lose the attention of your audience.

A deck will enable a reader to hop to any section that they like, which means it is more important to appropriately label everything in your content. You want to construct your report in a way where your reader can easily navigate through different parts of your deck, in whatever way makes the most sense for them.

While they are very similar, and in many cases, built with the same tools, presentation slides and a deck can indeed be very different. We recommend thinking clearly about your use case and then building the appropriate content from there.

If you want to include Airtable visualizations or charts on Google Sheets data in your next deck or presentation, be sure to try Superchart for free.

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Wondering why PowerPoint presentations are called decks? (Now you know)

Hrideep barot.

Presentation , Public Speaking

Why PowerPoint presentations are called decks , a question that lingered in my mind for a long time until I decided to jump on to finding out exactly why! And here I am to share all that I have learned about why PowerPoint presentations are called decks.

But before we dive deeper into understanding PowerPoint decks, it is very important to refresh our knowledge of some of the basics.

What are presentations?

Presentations are a way of conveying some information, idea, or opinion to your audience either with or without the use of visuals, in most cases PPTs .

While most of the time, we are bound to confuse presentations with PowerPoint presentations, they aren’t the same thing.

Presentations are a much wider spectrum that includes PowerPoint presentations as a part of it.

What are PowerPoint presentations?

PowerPoint presentations are slide decks created on the specific software called Microsoft PowerPoint that was released by Microsoft (duh!) in the year 1987 . PowerPoint helps create easy and effective digital slide decks; since it is so widely used, it has become synonymous with presentations at large.

It is similar to how we call photocopies Xerox!

(pst if you don’t understand the analogy, check out what we are trying to say here )

Why are PowerPoint presentations called decks?

Decks in presentations are a collection of slides (individual pages in PowerPoint) . And since PowerPoint presentations are nothing but a collection of well-laid-out slides, they are called decks.

Now to understand it better, let’s begin with the fundamental structure, shall we?

Assuming you go to PowerPoint right now, what is the first thing you’ll see?

A blank template that would prompt you to add text, right? That is a slide. As you keep adding slides to your PowerPoint, the collection of these slides, in the end, is what we call a deck.

But then again,

Why is it called a PowerPoint deck?

A PowerPoint deck is similar to a deck of cards. In a deck of cards, a deck is composed of 52 cards; Similarly, in PowerPoint, a deck or pile of slides is what is known as a PowerPoint deck.

So, does this mean that the presentation is important only in its entirety and not as individual slides?

Absolutely no!

Just like in a game of cards, the ace carries its importance and so does a card of jack; In PowerPoint decks too, each slide carries with it its unique importance . However, when separated the slides would lose their meaning.

Again, what would you do if you find a queen card lying on your room’s floor? slide it under the bed? I mean it would be ideal considering you don’t know where the rest of the cards are!

Similarly, individual slides gain their meaning when they are compiled with other slides.

This means each slide carries its own different set of information that helps in conveying an idea at the end .

When did PowerPoint presentations become decks?

PowerPoint presentations became decks on the day they came into being, that is in 1987.

Presentations had been made using stacks of papers or sheets filled with information even before digital presentations came into being.

As shocking as it may be, presentations already involved the use of decks in some form or the other from the very initial day of the specification building our communication skills.

While we started with rock paintings or carvings, we can include them as a form of presentation but not as decks.

Later came the use of sheets or paper to deliver information. This was done using flip paper cards .

There is evidence that presentations using flip charts became very common during the 1940s. These sheets or posters would be joined together with the help of metal fasteners. The speaker or presenter would then flip from one page to the other to share information.

Sounds very similar to our digital presentations, doesn’t it? Except we don’t have to tire our arms by flipping pages. We can simply click to move on to the next slide. How convenient!

Coming back to the last bit of our history of slide decks, somewhere in the 90s -2010’s PowerPoint as a software gained major attention from the public. The slide decks started to be created on PowerPoint exclusively and that is how we moved from saying slide decks to PowerPoint decks.

Going over it again

What is a slide deck in powerpoint.

A slide deck in PowerPoint is nothing but a collection of slides in Microsoft PowerPoint.

What is a PowerPoint slide deck?

It is just another way of saying Slide decks in PowerPoint!

Why are PowerPoint slides called decks??

Since PowerPoint gives you a collection of slides or a deck of slides, it is known as decks.

What is the purpose of a Slide deck in a presentation?

Slide decks help the presenter present his/her/their topic more effectively. It aids the presenter in giving the speech by providing prompts or hints to maintain a flow in their speech. On the other hand, it helps the audience visualize as they listen to the speaker.

Out of the many purposes that a slide deck can serve a presenter, here are a few that we would like to address in this article:

To pitch new ideas or products
To explain or introduce a concept
To share one’s opinions or views

1. To pitch new ideas or products

Slide decks happen to be a very crucial part of making pitches to attract your clients, or to make them understand what your product/ services are all about and how they can be beneficial to them.

Some of the ways we can try to win over or convince the client/ customer to agree to your terms are by showing charts or graphs of your previous success rates or giving out statistics on the problem that your company or product provides a solution for.

2. To explain or introduce a concept

Slide decks being used to explain a concept is something that I believe we have all experienced in schools or colleges.

With smart classrooms, the blackboards have found their place in restaurants and cafes and presentations have made their way to now be a widely used way of delivering lectures.

3. To share one’s opinions or views

Be it in conferences or competitions or even in your college when you are presenting on a topic, it is mostly with the purpose of sharing your opinions, views, or findings through slide decks.

How do you create a deck in PowerPoint?

When it comes to creating decks in PowerPoint, there are two things that we need to take a look into, the technical aspects and the aesthetic ones.

When we talk about the technical aspect of creating a deck in PowerPoint, we mean ensuring that you have the software installed in your system, be it a laptop or even your phone.

Head to AppStore or play store and install it.

Though we have been taught how to create PowerPoint presentations since very early days, we still suggest you take a minute and understand the various features offered by the software like the layouts, themes, and more. Having an understanding of some of the basic features can help you in creating a basic template easily!

If, however, you are looking for ways to create a slide deck other than on PowerPont, then head to some of the most resourceful sites that provide you with a number of templates!

A few such sites are Canva , Evanto , and more

Now when we talk about the Aesthetics of creating a PowerPoint, we first need to accept and appreciate the fact that the aesthetics or look of your presentation can add extra points to your entire presentation.

We have a list of 5 tips for the same. And if you follow them, you will surely be able to find an answer to..

Why are PowerPoint presentations effective?

A few tips for creating presentations:

1. Less is more

We have all heard this one a gazillion times and more, especially when it comes to Powerpoint presentations, Less is more!

Provide very precise information in your PowerPoint. To make your points short. You can stick to using the 5 by 5 model . The model suggests that you must not add more than 5 points to a slide. And each point must contain no more than 5 words.

If you still have no idea what you should add, try adding your headings and subheadings in your PowerPoint to make it more on point.

2. Quality over quantity

Again, adding less content doesn’t mean that you compromise on the quality of information that you share through your presentation. Add short points that make sense and add value to your audience or help in putting your point across in the best way possible.

3. Keep the curiosity alive

What does it mean when we say keep the curiosity alive? We mean, try not to share your entire slide to your audience in one go. Add effects or transitions to focus only on the point you are speaking on at that point.

We can say the same in the case of adding too much information to your PowerPoint. Do not add big paragraphs as you shatter your viewer’s curiosity who thanks to you ar enow more engrossed in reading the slides than listening to your presentation.

4. Neutralize your PowerPoint

By neutralizing we mean adding complementing slides to your PowerPoint decks. If you have selected a more dark theme, try neutralizing it with light-toned slides even if it is used as a transition slide.

5. Add visuals as and when possible

Ask yourself, can the information that you have added in your PowerPoint presentation be presented in the form of a graph, a table, or a diagram? If yes, then always choose to do it. Switch to visuals as it not only makes your content crisper but also is more appealing to the viewers.

This brings us to our next point,

Why PowerPoint presentations are not effective?

There are many reasons why PowerPoint can not be very effective. We have listed down about 3 reasons here. Go over them and try to not make the same blunders if you want to be an effective presenter!

1. Tons of Content

Adding more content to your slide may indeed help you remember the content better but it might bore the audience to death.

So just as we discussed, try to add content to your presentations in the form of short pointers. Or least try to make use of keywords and avoid writing entire paragraphs about your topic on the PowerPoint presentation.

An example of what simply copy-pasting a paragraph from your speech to PowerPoint could look like.

2. Poor color/ theme

The last thing we want is for the audience to struggle reading or seeing what we are trying to show them through the presentation. And this situation can possibly happen when there was little to no thought put into either selecting the right theme or use of overlapping colors.

Check out the example below if you want to take a look at what we are talking about!

3. Poor font choice

Another way of making it difficult for your audience to understand your presentation is by using fonts like the one shown in the picture below. Such fonts may surely be a little different, and to some extent aesthetic but it requires lots of effort from the viewers to actually understand what is written on the slide!

Final words

Let us try to summarize the entire blog for you in a couple of lines.

So essentially call it decks, slide decks, or presentation decks, they all mean the same. It is simply a collection of slides. And when such a collection is made on Microsoft’s PowerPoint, what do we call it?

Yes! you guessed it right (Hopefully?)

It is called PowerPoint decks or slide decks on PowerPoint.

There are tons of ways of making a PowerPoint deck. However, focusing on the template, and theme, and adding precise and quality content can help you go a long way.

That’s about it for now! Check out Frantically Speaking for more information on similar topics.

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Building Strategy Consulting Slide Decks: The Complete Guide

Table of contents.

There’s something different about slide decks from strategy consulting firms like McKinsey, Bain or BCG . For some reason, they just seem more convincing. But it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what makes those presentations good.

As a strategy consultant, you very quickly realize there are two important components of a compelling strategy presentation:

The ‘thinking’. This is the rigorous problem definition, analysis, synthesis, and insight that happens before you open up PowerPoint. Without this, even the most well-crafted strategy presentation lacks impact.
The presentation. This is the distinctive, structured, and clear way that strategy consultants build their slide decks. Without this, even the most powerful insights lose their force.

In this guide, we show you how to do both those things. In chapters 1-3, we discuss how to structure your slide deck, define your objective, and craft a compelling argument and storyline.

Then in chapters 4-6, we show you best practices for building your slides and reviewing your slide deck.

By the end of this guide, you’ll have the ability to craft a compelling strategy slide deck with a clear and compelling storyline that leads your audience to your desired conclusion.

Structure your slide deck

Before we get into the detail of building your slide deck, it’s important to understand how to structure your presentation.

There is a common structure that is used for almost all strategy presentations. It’s based on a concept known as the Pyramid Principle , which was popularized by Barbara Minto at McKinsey & Co.

According to Minto, there are three components to a well-constructed slide deck:

The executive summary: Provides the reader a full summary of the argument and recommendations within your slide deck for readers that are more interested in the ‘so what’ than the detailed analysis.
The body slides: Illustrates the analysis that supports each claim you make in your slide deck’s argument and thus slide objective.
Next steps or recommendations slides: Clearly outlines the key implications or ‘so what’ of your slide deck, as well as any next steps required.

In this guide, we will walk you through how to tackle each of these sections one by one. But first, we start by setting the objective of your slide deck, and crafting your argument and storyline.

Define the objective of your deck

Let’s start at the beginning. The purpose of your slide deck isn’t to show off all the things you know… or how great you are at analysis… or how beautiful your slides are.

Instead, the purpose of your slide deck is to persuade your audience and lead them to an objective. And, as the author of the slide deck, you need to set the objective before you start building your slide deck.

Having a clear objective for your slide deck is important for a number of reasons:

It helps you focus your research and analysis on things that are relevant to your objective.
You can quickly test the quality of your content by testing whether it is sufficient to achieve your objective.
It helps inform the tone and positioning of the messages in your slides.

Your objective can take many forms. For example, it could be simply to inform your audience, to gain endorsement for a decision, or to achieve a specific action or next step.

As the author of the slide deck, you must ensure that the objective is clear and agreed upon. All the work that you’re about to do to build your slide deck is guided by your objective.

Craft the argument and storyline

Now that you’ve determined the objective of your slide deck, you need to craft an argument and storyline that leads to your objective.

To some extent, your slide deck’s argument will naturally appear from insights gathered through research and analysis. As you conduct research, you’ll slowly uncover the “real state of affairs”, which will be supported by data.

It’s your job to translate this argument into a compelling story; one that grabs the attention of your reader and communicates your argument in a clear and easy-to-understand way.

To do this, you should use a situation-complication-resolution storyline .

This is a universal structure; it’s used in books, plays, films, advertising, religion, politics, and more. It looks something like this:

The scene is set and the characters are introduced (situation)
Something goes wrong (complication)
They fix the problem and live happily ever after (resolution)

When storytelling in PowerPoint, you should use the same structure. But in the context of your slide deck, your storyline will look something like:

This thing is important (situation)
There is a problem with this thing (complication)
Therefore, we need to respond — and here is how (resolution)

The dot-dash structure

Writing a storyline for your presentation doesn’t happen in PowerPoint. In fact, you don’t open up PowerPoint until you’re completely satisfied with your storyline.

Instead of jumping into PowerPoint, you start by writing out your storyline in a text document using the dot-dash structure .

By writing your slide deck’s storyline in a text document, you can easily identify any faulty or missing logic in your story and ensure that you have the data required to support each claim you make.

And when you’re completely satisfied with your storyline, you can move it into PowerPoint. Your storyline should be communicated in the slide lead-ins, like so:

And once you’ve built the skeleton of your slide deck with the storyline communicated “horizontally” across the leads-ins, you’re ready to start building individual slides and the “vertical flow”.

Build body slides

Before you jump into building individual slides, there are two main components of slides that you need to understand:

The lead-in: The text at the top of your slide. This should be written as an action title that communicates the implication or ‘so what’ of the slide, not describes the content of the slide.
The slide body: The content of your slide. You should only communicate one insight per slide and choose the simplest method possible.

Components a PowerPoint slide: slide lead-in and slide body

There is a close relationship between the slide lead-in and slide body. And this relationship is best explained by the Golden Rule of slide building.

The Golden Rule of slide building is:

“One slide, one insight, fully articulated in the lead-in, and supported by the body”

In other words, each slide should only communicate one insight. That insight should be fully explained in words in the lead-in, and fully supported by data in the slide body.

In addition, there should be nothing in the lead-in that’s not in the body, and nothing in the body that’s not in the lead-in.

Data, charts, and other quantitative slides

Claims that are supported by data are naturally more compelling than claims supported by ‘expert’ opinions, focus groups, and other qualitative evidence.

Therefore, where possible, you should always prioritize quantitative slides over qualitative slides.

But don’t go overboard with your data visualization. Sometimes it can be tempting to show off our technical skills by choosing the most complex visualization available. This is bad practice.

Instead, you should always choose the simplest chart to demonstrate your insight. But it can be tricky to determine which chart to use. So we’ve put together a simple decision tree to ensure that you always choose the most appropriate chart for your data .

Text, conceptual, and other qualitative slides

There are some insights that simply cannot be communicated with charts or data. In these cases, you need to find the most appropriate conceptual chart.

Unlike qualitative slides, there are no simple guides for text and conceptual slides. And because of this, the ability to craft well-structured conceptual slides is the mark of a skilled consultant.

It’s surprisingly tricky to be able to communicate a qualitative insight in a clear and structured visual manner. The best way to build the skill is to practice. But you can also learn by exploring common qualitative slides used by strategy consultants .

Download 120+ strategy consulting presentations for free

Looking for slide inspiration? Download 120+ consulting slide decks from top strategy consulting firms, such as McKinsey, BCG and Bain!

Write the executive summary

An executive summary slide is the first slide in your presentation but the last slide you build.

The executive summary slide fully summarizes the argument, storyline, and supporting evidence of the body slides. Because we already need to have finished every other part of the slide deck, we write it last.

Executive summary slides help the reader “follow along” with your slide deck. There are a few main benefits:

They provide context to help the reader understand why the topic of the slide deck is important.
They communicate the high-level argument before the reader gets into the body of the slide deck. This helps the reader understand your more detailed body slides.
They are a “map” that the reader can reference back to if they start losing the line of argument in the body of the deck.

A typical executive summary looks something like the following slides, which are from a BCG report on “Melbourne as a Global Cultural Destination” and can be downloaded here .

Good executive summaries follow three best practices:

They are structured with bolded text for summary sentences and bullet points for supporting data. This ensures that every claim is clearly supported by data.
The bolded summary sentences can be read alone to tell the slide’s storyline (i.e. you don’t need to read the supporting data in the bullet points).
The bolded summary sentences reflect the SCR storyline structure of the slide deck

One other good practice (that you don’t see in the BCG example) is to reference the associated body slide throughout the executive summary. This helps direct a reader to the detailed analysis behind every claim in the executive summary.

Review your slide deck

Now that you’ve finished building all your slides and writing your executive summary, it’s time to review and finalize your slide deck.

There are three things that you need to check as you review your slide deck:

Chart completeness : Check that your charts are comprehensively labeled, including chart titles, axis labels, units, time periods, etc.
Text brevity : Review your slide text, including your lead-ins, and ensure that you make your points with the minimum number of words possible.
Slide consistency : Review your slides and ensure that there is consistent formatting across the slides.

Reviewing your charts and visualizations

There’s a surprising amount of detail contained in charts and it’s quite easy to forget to key include key information.

Some examples of common charting mistakes include missing chart titles, labels, axes, units, dates, and legends. You should also consider how you highlights the implication of your charts.

To make this easier, you should use a charting checklist to methodically cross-reference your chart with best practice.

Refining your slide text

There’s an important place for text in slides. Not only can your use text to provide important context to support your visualizations, but also to communicate insights without data.

Most people use too many words in their slides. They tend to use fancy “consulting speak” or long, verbose explanations that actually obsure their message.

As you review your slide deck, you should review all of the text in your slides and savagely sharpen your text by removing unnecessary words .

Ensuring consistency across slides

Finally, you should use your last review to check for consistency across slides.

Start by ensuring that the formatting is consistent. For example, your slide format, spacing, fonts and slide numbers should all be consistent across the slides.

And then finish your review by ensuring all concepts are communicated consistently across slides. For example, if you’ve numbered or colored concepts a certain way, then ensure that they remain consistent throughout your slide deck.

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Network Monitoring Software Pitch Deck

Network monitoring software pitch deck presentation, free google slides theme and powerpoint template.

Download the Network Monitoring Software Pitch Deck presentation for PowerPoint or Google Slides. The education sector constantly demands dynamic and effective ways to present information. This template is created with that very purpose in mind. Offering the best resources, it allows educators or students to efficiently manage their presentations and engage audiences. With its user-friendly and useful features, everyone will find it easy to customize and adapt according to their needs. Whether for a lesson presentation, student report, or administrative purposes, this template offers a unique solution for any case!

Features of this template

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COMMENTS

What is a Slide Deck? Everything You Need to Know!
A PowerPoint slide deck is a term used to describe a slide deck or a presentation that is created using Microsoft PowerPoint as the presentation design application. A PowerPoint slide deck usually consists of multiple slides put together to create a presentation. That said, a PowerPoint slide deck is more commonly referred to as a "slide deck ...
What Is a PowerPoint Slide Deck? (PPT Presentations for 2023
A PowerPoint slide deck is a collection of slides that are in the same presentation. You'll hear "slide deck" used somewhat interchangeably with "presentation." Like a deck of cards, each slide is a key part of the overall package. Individual slides make up the slide deck , like the cards in a deck of playing cards that are included in this ...
What Is a Slide Deck & How It's Done (Tips & Templates)
A slide deck is a sequence of slides, or pages, used as visual aids in a presentation or a speech. It's used in business and education to communicate complex information. The slides in the deck are set in a logical order that completes a coherent narrative. The term "slide deck" comes from the original mechanical slide projector which ...
What is a Slide Deck and how to create one
Presentation deck meaning. A presentation deck is simply a slide presentation that is typically used in business meetings to cover a specific topic of collective interest. The deck of slides that we know today as a digital file derives its name from the analog era where slides were physically printed and placed inside an apparatus that shone ...
How To Create a Slide Deck: Templates & Tips
Visme has thousands of editable slide deck templates to help you create presentations quickly. Here's how to customize your slide deck in Visme. 1. Select and Edit a Template. Each slide deck template in Visme has two or more slides. Feel free to add, remove or reorder slides to your deck as you proceed.
How to Make an Engaging Slide Deck (+Example & Templates)
The difference between a forgettable slide deck and a memorable one lies in the groundwork you do before you sit down to build the slide deck. In the words of Nancy Duarte, the author of the book "slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations": "Audience interest is directly proportionate to the presenter's preparation.
Before PowerPoint: The Evolution of Presentations
When PowerPoint was introduced in 1987, presentations changed forever. It wasn't long before the presentation software took over and tools like overhead projectors and slide carousels became storage room trash. Before slides were designed on computers, they were made by hand. It took several days to design a slide deck and it was really ...
How to Create a Slide Deck in PowerPoint
1. Innovative Business Presentation Template Slide Deck. Powerful graphics with contrasting tones that add a vibrant vibe to your presentation. This slide deck is ideal for startups, tech talks, or any presentation that wants to showcase a vanguard style in touch with the latest design trends. Use This Template.
Presentation Deck Meaning: What is a PPT deck?
A Power Point deck is one of the most effective ways to navigate different topics, from all-hands meetings to investor presentations. The human brain struggles to remember a lengthy or complicated topic when you are presenting. In equal measure, your audience needs smaller bites of information they can process more easily and effectively.
10 tips for better slide decks
Here's the original image. Here's the process for masking it. (1) Set the image transparency to something less than 100. (2) Duplicate that image so there is one directly over the top of the other. (3) Set the dup'd image transparency back to 100. and (4) Follow the technique here to mask the dup'd image.
The Evolution of Presentations From Cave Paintings to PPT
Source: Computer History Museum. These slides from the early '70s include a bit more of a design element, with the company logo on the first slide to the left. ... LinkedIn's 2004 pitch deck presentation represents the drastic changes that slides experienced from the earliest presentations to the post-PowerPoint era. You can see that the ...
Next slide, please: A brief history of the corporate presentation
August 11, 2023. It's 1948, and it isn't a great year for alcohol. Prohibition has come and gone, and booze is a buyer's market again. That much is obvious from Seagram's annual sales ...
22 Tips: Designing an Effective Slide Deck Presentation
12. One image per slide: Just as there should be one idea per slide, there should also only be one image per slide. This keeps the message straightforward and focused, and it ensures you will take the advice above and use extra-large images. 13. Vary your visuals: Your deck shouldn't have 100% of one type of graphic.
Everything You Need to Know About Slide Decks
A slide deck is a collection of slides organized together to form a cohesive presentation. Slide decks are presentation tools that allow presenters to share their ideas with an audience. The slides can be used to showcase text, images, or multimedia content. Slide decks are typically used for presentations, but they can also be used for other ...
PowerPoint Vs. Slide Deck, Slide Deck Meaning & More Simple Terms
The term "slide deck" is derived from the old days of presentations when slides were physical transparencies that were loaded into a carousel and projected onto a screen. These physical slides would be shuffled around to create the presentation, much like a deck of cards. Thus, the term "slide deck" was born.
Creating a slide deck for any occasion.
8. Export your slide deck. When you've finished creating your deck, the final step is to export it in a format that can be projected or distributed. Exporting as Adobe PDF (Interactive) lets you play or click through interactive content directly in the presentation. To export, just click File in the main menu, then Export.
50 Best Slide Deck Templates for a Stellar Presentation
38. Nonprofit Art Presentation. This art-themed slide deck presentation design is crafted to project your charitable initiatives. You can use it to inspire readers about your mission, highlight your accomplishments and thank donors for their support. Using our variety of visual aids can increase the reader's trust in the legitimacy of your message.
The Difference Between Presentation Slides and a Deck
Since a deck is meant as something that should be read, you can utilize the format to communicate a lot of information quickly. Second, presentation slides are relatively fast to make whereas a deck may be significantly time consuming. Assuming that you have a general outline of your speech, putting together the supporting slides should be ...
Presentation slide
A slide is a single page of a presentation. Collectively, a group of slides may be known as a slide deck. A slide show is an exposition of a series of slides or images in an electronic device or in a projection screen. Before the advent of the personal computer, a presentation slide could be a 35 mm slide viewed with a slide projector [1] or a ...
Wondering why PowerPoint presentations are called decks? (Now you know
PowerPoint presentations are slide decks created on the specific software called Microsoft PowerPoint that was released by Microsoft (duh!) ... Coming back to the last bit of our history of slide decks, somewhere in the 90s -2010's PowerPoint as a software gained major attention from the public. The slide decks started to be created on ...
Where does the use of "deck" to mean "set of slides" come from?
A slide deck is just another way to refer to a presentation deck or pitch deck. The term was perhaps first used in Silicon Valley. As a little bit of history and to clarify on the above, the term slide deck comes from old technology. It goes back to times when we used those old slide projectors facing a wall.
Building Consulting Slide Decks: The Complete Guide
In this guide, we show you how to do both those things. In chapters 1-3, we discuss how to structure your slide deck, define your objective, and craft a compelling argument and storyline. Then in chapters 4-6, we show you best practices for building your slides and reviewing your slide deck. By the end of this guide, you'll have the ability ...
Silicon Laboratories Inc. 2024 Q1
The following slide deck was published by Silicon Laboratories Inc. ... Earnings Call Presentation. Apr. 24, 2024 8:46 AM ET Silicon Laboratories Inc. (SLAB) Stock. SA Transcripts.
Flushing Financial Corporation 2024 Q1
The following slide deck was published by Flushing Financial Corporation in conjunction with their 2024 Q1 earnings call. ... Earnings Call Presentation. Apr. 24, 2024 9:42 AM ET Flushing ...
What is a Pitch Deck? Examples, Tips and Templates
Quick Read. A pitch deck is a visual presentation that tells the story of a business to persuade and engage potential investors. The most common pitch deck slides are introduction, problem, solution, market size and opportunity, product, traction, team, competition, financials and use of funds. Learn from the eight real life pitch deck examples ...
Stifel Financial Corp. 2024 Q1
The following slide deck was published by Stifel Financial Corp. ... Results - Earnings Call Presentation. Apr. 24, 2024 10:14 AM ET Stifel Financial Corp. (SF) Stock, ...
Network Monitoring Software Pitch Deck Presentation
Different slides to impress your audience; Contains easy-to-edit graphics such as graphs, maps, tables, timelines and mockups; Includes 500+ icons and Flaticon's extension for customizing your slides; Designed to be used in Google Slides and Microsoft PowerPoint; Includes information about fonts, colors, and credits of the resources used
Ford Motor Company 2024 Q1
The following slide deck was published by Ford Motor Company in conjunction with their 2024 Q1 earnings call. ... Results - Earnings Call Presentation. Apr. 24, 2024 6:55 PM ET Ford Motor Company ...
SLM Corporation 2024 Q1
The following slide deck was published by SLM Corporation in conjunction with their 2024 Q1 earnings call. ... Earnings Call Presentation. Apr. 24, 2024 6:23 PM ET SLM Corporation (SLM) Stock ...
Evotec SE 2023 Q4
The following slide deck was published by Evotec SE in conjunction with their 2023 Q4 earnings call. ... Earnings Call Presentation. Apr. 24, 2024 11:46 AM ET Evotec SE (EVO) Stock, EVOTF Stock ...