Five Tips for Cutting The Time It Takes To Create New PowerPoint Presentations By Dave Paradi, MBA, co-author of “Guide to PowerPoint” If you are a professional who presents more than once a week, you are always looking for ways to cut down the time spent preparing presentations.  In today’s highly competitive business world, you can’t just use a canned presentation any more.  Each presentation needs to be customized for that audience.  But that can lead to you spending a lot of time preparing presentations.  How can you dramatically reduce the prep time and increase your productivity? The key is to reuse slides that you have already created.  This is one of the steps in my PowerPoint Presentation Effectiveness System and it is one that I find presenters don’t use nearly as often or effectively as they could.  Most presenters do reuse slides, but not in the systematic way that can really help them the most.  Here are five tips for reusing slides that will boost your productivity and increase the effectiveness of your presentations. 1.  Create a Library A lot of presenters waste time trying to find the slides they are looking for because there are some in one presentation, a few in another one from a few months ago and that one great slide from some time last year.  Without a central repository of slides, you spend time searching instead of quickly assembling your slides.  A good slide library will contain standard slides for key messages that you regularly present.  It could be market data, company data or product summary slides.  The library frees you from recreating slides each time and keeps the information consistent for each presentation.  It also gives you only one spot to check when looking for slides to use in an upcoming presentation. 2.  Keep the Library Updated A slide library is great, but if it gets out of date, it becomes of no use and you go back to searching multiple files for slides.  Schedule time every four months to spend half a day updating the slides in the library.  Go back over the presentations you have made and pick out the new ideas or new ways of presenting an idea that you came up with.  Use feedback from audience members to improve the clarity of slides.  By doing updates only three times per year, the task is not so onerous that it gets put off and eventually never done.  Book it in your calendar as an appointment with yourself and keep the appointment. 3.  Use a Consistent Look If you are not using a consistent design for your slides, your presentation will look like a middle school group project presentation.  Create a clean look for your slides, with no distracting graphics to take away from the content.  Choose fonts that are easy to read and are big enough to be read by the audience.  Include your branding at the bottom of the slides so that any printouts contain your brand as well.  Make sure you choose a color palette that has sufficient contrast to make text or shapes easily seen on the slides.  And finally, set all of this up in the Slide Master so that every new slide automatically takes on this new look. 4.  Learn about Layouts When I review slides from clients, the single most common problem is that the slides do not observe best practices on using layouts.  PowerPoint has a variety of layouts that pre-define where certain elements will be placed.  By ignoring these layout choices, too many presenters end up with inconsistent slides that have elements jumping to slightly different positions on each slide.  Not selecting layouts properly also causes problems when you need to reformat or reuse the slide as all formatting must be done manually.  Learn when to use the four basic layouts – title, tile and text, title only and blank – and your slide library will be much easier to use. 5.  Create Slides with Customization in Mind While the library will contain standard slides, not all the information on each slide needs to stay the same in every presentation.  For example, you may create a pie chart where the slice being emphasized changes depending on who the audience is (a real client situation recently).  In this case, you want to determine what parts of the slide should be changed if necessary and what standards should be adhered to.  When designing a slide, think through whether the slide will need to be customized and if so, how that should happen.  It will make the slides in the library more versatile and easier to use. When you have a library of slides to draw from, creating a presentation proceeds quickly: select the slides from the library, apply any customizations needed for this audience and add any custom slides required (using the same design automatically).  Then you are ready to practice the presentation.  A side benefit is that your presentations will be better as you polish the delivery of the standard slides through repeated practice. If you want to be more productive and deliver more consistent, convincing presentations, use a systematic approach to creating presentations from a library of slides.  Click here to find out more about the entire PowerPoint Presentation Effectiveness System. Dave Paradi is the co-author of "Guide to PowerPoint" from Prentice Hall. Dave’s research based PowerPoint Presentation Effectiveness System helps sales teams achieve greater sales rep productivity and deliver presentations that close more sales. ©MMVII Dave Paradi.  All rights reserved