If you’re a consultant, analyst, or finance professional, you know the pain of spending hours on PowerPoint slides. The biggest time-waster? Formatting before you’ve locked in your slide structure. The key to speed isn’t just knowing shortcuts – it’s following the right sequence. Here’s how to build slides efficiently without getting stuck in endless edits.
Step 1: Storyboard First
Before you start refining the details of each slide, map out your deck structure. Write down slide titles and subtitles in so you can validate the storyline upfront. A strong slide deck tells a clear story just from reading the slide headings in sequence.
- Get every idea onto a slide quickly: Don’t worry about formatting yet; just get the content down. Speed matters more than perfection at this stage.
- Validate early: Reshuffling slides after polishing them is a time sink. Catch structural issues now rather than after you’ve spent an hour perfecting slide design.
- Confirm with a manager or thought partner: Adjust before committing to full builds. Even a quick gut check with a colleague can prevent hours of unnecessary rework.
Nothing slows you down more than spending an hour aligning boxes, only to realize the storyline doesn’t work.
Step 2: Build the Slides
Once the structure is solid, start assembling content in logical buckets – ideas, data visualizations, and supporting evidence.
- Think in buckets: Most slides boil down to a few core structures: ideas with sub-ideas, comparisons, or conclusions with supporting points. Recognizing these buckets helps you work faster and removes the stress of creating slides from a blank page.
- Use pre-built slide templates: Keep a deck of high-quality template slides you can pull from when needed. There’s no award for formatting from a white page. Consultants at the top firms rarely build from scratch, they iterate and refine proven structures. Having a go-to template deck significantly cuts down on design time. And if you don’t want to do the work of aggregating your own slides, you can use the Consulting Toolkit – 130+ template slides that cover every stage of a consulting engagement.
- Automate formatting: PowerPoint add-ins like PowerTools are a game-changer. Bulk-format slides, distribute shapes evenly, and apply consistent formatting in a fraction of the time it would take manually. Features like Split & Distribute let you quickly create structured content blocks without dragging and resizing everything by hand.
Step 3: Wordsmith
Once the structure and formatting are in place, refine the wording. Don’t obsess over phrasing too early – good slides come together in the editing phase.
- Keep it concise: Clear, punchy wording is always better than long, cluttered text. If a slide takes more than a few seconds to understand, it’s too wordy. A trick is to imagine explaining your slide message to a peer, and that’s often the level of complexity your language should have.
- Use GenAI to sharpen messaging: Tools like Chat GPT make it ridiculously easy to refine language and align tone across slides. If your deck feels inconsistent, AI can help smooth out phrasing and ensure clarity. A typical prompt is often: ‘re-write this sentence more concisely’.
- Embrace iteration: Your first draft isn’t your final draft, and that’s fine. The key is to get the content down quickly so you can tweak and polish later.
Step 4: QA with a Strong Checklist
Before sending your deck out, run through a final quality check. Instead of taking you through a list of QA reminders, here’s a free comprehensive list we already put together: The Ultimate PowerPoint QA Checklist for Consultants.
Work Smarter, Not Harder
Being fast at PowerPoint isn’t about being a design perfectionist, it’s about following the right workflow. Storyboard first, build using templates, automate formatting, refine with AI, and finish with a strong QA.
The best consultants aren’t the ones who build slides the fastest, but the ones who spend less time tweaking and more time thinking. Get the sequence right, and you’ll build professional slides in a fraction of the time, without the frustration.
