Imagine that the slides in your presentation gain weight as you add more text or clutter. So, you just keep feeding these images your high-calorie content and, before you know it, your presentation has become a bloated blob of blubbering babble! Sound familiar? Well, SLIDE-REDUCTION is possible! There is a way to slim your slides into speaking-shape!

The PowerPoint Slim-Slide Diet attempts to achieve a visual “weight” of 8 seconds per slide. In other words, if your audience can digest your slide content in eight seconds or less, you will be able to reach maximum attention span on that image. The more slides in your talk that meet the 8-second test, the higher the overall attention to the message.

So, you need to reduce the content on your slides. Just follow these Slim Slide diet rules:

• No wrapping
• No full sentences
• No sub-bullets

If a bullet point wraps to a second or third line, you will read it. If there are full sentences, you will recite them. If there are sub-bullets, or even sub-sub-bullets, you will narrate them.

Worried about forgetting? Here is the trick to slowly weaning yourself off those fattening slides.

1. Find a busy or cluttered slide that you think needs trimming.
2. Make a DUPLICATE of that slide.
3. Reduce the text on the duplicate slide, as much as possible, to the point where the content still makes sense.
4. Go to the slide sorter view (the view that shows small “thumbnail-like” versions of the slides)
5. HIDE the original slide (use the hide slide button/choice from the Slide Show menu)
6. Run through the presentation and see if you can still deliver the content using the slim-slide version.

Do this for as many slides in your presentation that you think need to lose weight. If you keep getting stuck on a slim-slide, then go back to the slide sorter and hide the slim-slide version and then un-hide the original “busy” slide.

The goal is to reduce the overall weight of the presentation by only using the slim-slides and eventually deleting the busy or cluttered slides.

That’s the PowerPoint Slim-Slide Diet!