Lesson 5 of 5 · about 25 minutes

Slides that help you talk

🏠The everyday picture

Think of a good teacher at a blackboard. They don't write the whole lesson on the board; they write the one word or picture that helps you follow what they're saying. Slides do the same job. If people are reading long slides, they aren't listening to you.

📘What it really is

A presentation is a set of slides you show one after another while you speak. A few rules make most talks better:

One idea per slide, with a short title that says the point: "Atta runs out every Thursday", not "Data".
Few words, big text. If you can't read it from the back of the room, it's too small. Put the rest in the speaker notes box under the slide, which only you see when you present.
A picture or a chart instead of a table, where you can. Copy a chart straight from your spreadsheet.
Plain, steady design. One font, one or two colours, the same layout all through.
Start the show properly: Slide Show, then From Beginning (Google Slides: the Slideshow button). Arrow keys move between slides.

📝A worked example

Five slides for the shop owner's Monday meeting about the stock sheet:

Title: "Our new stock sheet": your name and the date.
The problem: "We ran out of atta three times last month", with one photo of an empty shelf.
What the sheet does: three short lines: works out what's left, adds up stock value, warns when to reorder.
What it found: a simple bar chart of items that hit "Reorder" most often.
What we'll do: "Check the Reorder list every evening at 8 pm. Order by 10 am."

Everything else (how the formulas work, which cells to type in) goes in the speaker notes and the handout.

🖱️Try it

Make the five slides above for your own project, or for any idea you want to explain. Then present it to one person, or to yourself out loud, in under five minutes. Notice any slide where you read the words instead of talking.

⚠️Common mistakes

Pasting a whole spreadsheet onto a slide. Nobody can read 40 rows from across a room. Show the three that matter.
Light grey text on a white background. It's hard to read on a projector. Use strong contrast: dark on light, or light on dark.
Too many animations. One simple transition, or none, keeps attention on what you're saying.

✅Quick check

Where do the details go that you want to remember but not show?

Show the answer

In the speaker notes under each slide. You can see them while you present; your audience sees only the slide.

A slide's title says "Sales". How could it say more?