Let’s say you’ve downloaded a great slide, but the colors do not fit your color scheme. Luckily, PowerPoint will fix it automatically once you paste it into your presentation. You can also change the colors manually for more creative control. And if you wish to add or remove an element, readjustment is super simple. Elements from other slides will seamlessly transfer by copying and pasting, and deleting will remove any unwanted elements. Resize elements with Ctrl + G to group them together, and modify them to your liking.

Pasting information into premade slides is one thing; having the ability to create great slides from the ground, or changing the visuals of premade slides while still maintaining professionalism is another. Luckily, getting to know the latter is not difficult.
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But why do you need killer slides in the first place?
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You need to build trust to convince your client.
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A lousy PowerPoint distorts your message, making you look unqualified, unfit or incapable. If your slides look sloppy, your calculations might also be called into question.

The fundamental principle of good presentation design is that it should support your message, not detract from it in any way.

You (and your presentation) are aiming to convince the audience of something, whether you are selling a business, presenting a 2025 strategy or preparing for a boardroom meeting.

You already know your objective. You probably also know how to communicate it using The Pyramid Principle. Obviously, you know the numbers. The presentation is the easy part. Just avoid mistakes and keep it clean and professional.

Executive management don’t like inaccuracies because it prompts uncertainty – this applies to both calculations and business presentations.

But what is professionalism and how do you avoid inaccuracies?

Design is subjective right?

Not necessarily. Take alignment; it is a law you must follow, like doing the same thing on both sides of an equation.

Consistency across slides is also a rule, not an optional extra.

But alignment is one thing, and style and preferences are another.

There can be no doubt that style is more subjective and varies between clients. Yet, in SlideHub’s experience, most businesses are fairly reserved when it comes to design – when presented with several options ranging from artistic to conservative, our clients choose the latter 80% of the time.

Of course, there are exceptions, but using multiple contrast colors and multi-colored gradients just isn’t clean or professional.

If you want to look professional, align all the elements in your slide deck.

Take our word for it.

We know we are biased and have an incentive to raise awareness and create demand four our services, but alignment is among the most basic design principles, and you will find few business professionals who dispute that.

Alignment alone will not win you the pitch or make you stand out, but cutting corners might just do the opposite.

Alignment is easy to fix and improves the quality of your slides, providing you ensure consistency across all of them.

Yes, all of them.

There is no one correct way of aligning slides that exists in the world. But, one thing is indisputable: if your slides don’t align, it is easy to tell, and your presentation will suffer.

It might take hours, but skipping this vital step will result in a presentation that creates a feeling of uncertainty in your client.

Want to learn more about alignment and discover how to make killer business presentations?

In today’s fast-paced world, you must get the right message across as quickly as possible. The last thing you want to be doing is losing valuable time explaining your findings because your data visualization wasn’t up to par.

When presenting your findings, visualization is a vital tool to help decision makers reach the right conclusion, as quickly as possible.

Your aim, with any presentation, should be to save the audience’s time and help them make the right decisions. You want to reinforce the right data, draw their eye to the right section of the page and do every bit of the analysis for them, without creating a bias.

You’ve spent hours gathering information, describing your data, analyzing and inferring. You (or somebody else) put in the hard work; now it’s time to deliver your point - in seconds.

In general, they don’t care about your process or how many hours you put in; if your slides don’t illustrate your point, the hours don’t matter. This is why it is so important that the presentation of your data is simple.

Support it with data-based arguments and proper visualization; it comes back to the hygiene of slides – a necessary evil. The question of when to use what can be difficult to answer, but the rules of thumb in this ebook will help you to avoid the most common pitfalls.

Let’s start out with the basics; the fundamentals you need to know before you level-up to advanced data visualization.
Let's illustrate with an example

A bubble chart is a scatter plot with an additional quantitative variable. The additional variable is represented by the size of each dot and aids the reader in understanding context. For example, the size of the bubble could represent sales of a specific product, while the x-axis represents time and the y-axis represents revenue.

OK – that’s the basics out of the way. Now, it’s time to move on and impress your peers and clients – and have fun while doing it!

We have all seen the complicated chart with five axes and eight variables; they look cool and make the presenter look clever but (at least sometimes), but often, that’s all they do.

The illustration below looks visually appealing and exciting, yet, alone, it makes no sense; it lacks context.

This visualization is not helping to sell your idea if you are the only person in the room who intuitively understands it. Your charts, whether advanced or basic, should help aid decisions without becoming too theoretical.

It shows how different fractions or components rank and is an excellent alternative to the pie and bar chart. Use it when you want to show how different components make up a total. It can also be used to break down categories and display hierarchy.

Another example of data visualization for business is the evergreen bubble scatter plot. It's great when you have more than two variables and trends to demonstrate like the example below.