How to Avoid Death by PowerPoint and Deliver Engaging Presentations
Liam Sandford
Liam Sandford is a Head of Marketing, public speaking expert, and 2x Best Selling Author including the book Effortless Public Speaking. He helps ambitious professionals and entrepreneurs communicate with impact to get noticed, grow their career, and build their business.
Death by PowerPoint happens when your slides become the show and you become the person reading them out. The fix is a single shift in how you see the deck: your slides are the support act, and you are the headliner. Once you accept that, everything else on this page follows. Cut the words down, give each slide one job, and make sure you could deliver the whole thing if the projector died on you.
That last test matters more than any design tip, so I will come back to it. First, let me tell you why most presentations lose the room before the speaker has finished slide two.
Why most presentations die on their feet
The biggest mistake is treating slides as your memory prompt. You cram in the bullet points so you will not forget what comes next, then you stand there reading them back to a room that can read faster than you can speak. People finish your slide in about four seconds. You are still on the first line. For those spare seconds they have nothing to do but check their phone, and once a room drifts it is very hard to win back.
Here is the part people miss. Your slides were never built for you. They exist to help the audience understand, remember, or act on your message. The moment a slide is on screen to reassure you rather than to serve them, you have swapped roles with your own deck. You are now the support act and the projector is the headliner. That is exactly backwards, and the audience feels it even if they could not name it.
So the goal of this whole article is to put you back in front. Not by memorising more, but by needing the slides less.
The one test that decides everything: could you survive if the projector died?
Picture the bulb blowing out two minutes before you start. No slides. No safety net. Just you and the room.
If that thought makes your stomach drop, your slides are running the show. If it makes you shrug, you have already won, because it means you know your material and the deck is genuinely a support tool rather than a crutch. I use this as the first question when I help someone tidy a presentation: not "are your slides good" but "could you bin them and still deliver". Almost everyone fails it the first time. The fix is not more design polish. It is building the presentation around what you want to say, then adding slides that reinforce it, rather than building slides first and hoping a message shows up.
PowerPoint is not your prompt. It is your support act. Hold that line and the rest of this gets much easier.
Design your slides for the audience, not for your nerves
Before you open PowerPoint at all, answer four questions on paper. Not in the deck. On paper, where you cannot hide behind a template.
What does my audience really want or need from me here?
What are the two or three things they must walk out remembering?
How do I make each of those clear, visual, and relevant to them?
What one action can they take the moment I finish?
If a slide does not serve one of those four answers, it does not earn a place. This is the same discipline behind good public speaking preparation: the work happens before the software opens, in deciding what the room needs, not in choosing a transition effect.
Clarity beats cleverness every time. A confused audience is a lost audience, and a clever slide that takes ten seconds to decode has already cost you the room. When you are tempted to add one more point to a slide, ask whether it makes the message clearer or just makes you feel more thorough. Usually it is the second one.
A structure that holds attention: the Nano Speech
Most presentations are still built on the 10/10/10 model: ten minutes to introduce, ten to deliver, ten to summarise. It is one of the main reasons rooms go quiet in the wrong way. You spend a third of your time clearing your throat before the point, and another third repeating what you already said. By the time you reach anything useful, half the room has mentally left the building.
The structure I use instead is the Nano Speech, and it works whether you have ten minutes or half an hour. It has three parts.
Open. Start with a hook, not an agenda. A short story, a question, or a single striking number that ties to your topic. You want people to feel something and lock in early.
Body. Deliver your main point in one sentence, then back it up with a story, some data, or an example. If you cannot say your main point in one sentence, you are not clear enough on it yourself, and no slide will rescue that.
Close. End with a call to action, not a summary. Tell people the one thing to do next.
For anything longer, you stack nano speeches: open, then body, transition, body, transition, body, close. Each block is its own little arc, which is how you keep an audience engaged from start to finish instead of fading in the middle.
And please, no agenda slide. An agenda gives the audience permission to think about something else, because you have just handed them the map and told them which parts they are allowed to switch off for. Spend those opening seconds building curiosity instead.
Ask for what you want in the middle, not at the end
Here is a lesson that changed how I build every deck, and it is the opposite of what most slide templates encourage.
I once ran a webinar to around 250 people. Somewhere in the middle, while attention was at its peak, I dropped in a single poll asking who wanted a demo of the product. Not at the end, where the ask usually goes. Right in the middle, while I was still in full flow. That one prompt produced 60 demo requests, straight from the poll, during the live session. Not from an email that went out afterwards. From the moment itself, while people were still leaning in.
If I had parked that ask on a final slide, most of those 60 would never have raised their hand, because by the closing slide a good chunk of any audience is already thinking about their next meeting. The point is not the audience size. The point is the timing. Attention is the most valuable currency you have on stage, and it is highest in the middle of a strong section, not at the very end. So put your most important ask, your poll, your call to action, wherever attention is peaking, and design the slide that carries it to be the clearest in your whole deck.
This is where slide design and speaking strategy meet. The best slide in the world does nothing if it lands at the moment nobody is watching.
The 3 principles to avoid death by PowerPoint
With your message and structure sorted, now you refine the slides themselves. Three principles do most of the work.
Principle 1: balance words and visuals (nine words a slide)
The classic trap is a slide full of paragraphs or a bullet list nine items deep. When people read, they stop listening. When they stop listening, they stop connecting to you.
So follow one hard rule: no more than nine words on a slide. That number is deliberately uncomfortable. It forces you to strip a slide down to a phrase, which forces you to carry the detail with your voice, which pulls attention off the screen and back onto you where it belongs. Let your visuals amplify the message rather than compete with it. One strong image, one clear icon, one readable figure.
A quick note on building these fast: I have been using AI to help draft and tighten slides since 2022, and the single most useful prompt is not "make me a slide", it is "cut this slide to nine words or fewer and tell me what I lost". The version it hands back is almost always what should have been on screen in the first place. The tool is good at ruthlessness in a way most of us are not with our own words.
Principle 2: one message per slide
Each slide carries one idea. Cram three points onto a single visual and the audience does not know where to look, so they look nowhere. Ten simple slides with ten clear ideas beat one clever slide holding all ten at once. Every transition then becomes a reset, a small moment for people to refocus and follow you to the next thing. Handled well, that rhythm of one idea, then the next, is a large part of how you hold a room. Transitions are where a presentation is won or lost.
Principle 3: direct the focus
Every slide should tell the eye exactly where to go. Three tools do this naturally:
Contrast to guide attention to one key word or figure.
Numbers and data, used sparingly, made large and readable, never buried in a table.
Images and icons, because a visual cue lingers in memory long after the words have slipped away.
Use them on purpose, not for decoration. Highlight the one thing you most want remembered and cut anything that competes with it. If everything on the slide is emphasised, nothing is.
How to wean yourself off the slides
If you know you lean on your deck too hard, do not go cold turkey. Reduce the dependence in stages.
Replace full sentences with short key phrases, then replace the phrases with a single word or image.
Practise whole sections with the screen off. If you can deliver a section blind, that section is yours, not the slide's.
Swap a slide dense with text for a story or a real example. A story you have lived is impossible to read off a screen, so it drags your delivery back to being human.
Rehearse enough to be comfortable, but not so much you become robotic, and never do a final full rehearsal on the day itself.
As you shift the weight from the slides to your delivery, two things happen at once. You get more confident, because confidence is success remembered and every rep without the slides is a memory you can bank. And the deck quietly turns from a safety net into what it was always meant to be: a support act for the real event, which is you talking to the room. For how all of this fits the wider skill, the Ultimate Guide to Public Speaking ties the threads together.
Actionable takeaways
Run the dead projector test first. If you could not deliver without the slides, fix your command of the material before you touch the design.
Cut to nine words a slide and one idea per slide, then let contrast, numbers, and images point the eye.
Ask in the middle, not the end. Put your most important prompt where attention is peaking, and make that slide the clearest in the deck.
Frequently asked questions about death by PowerPoint
What really counts as death by PowerPoint?
It is not just ugly slides. It is the moment the deck takes over the job you are meant to be doing. The signs are easy to spot: you are reading off the screen, every slide is a wall of text, and if the projector failed you would have nothing to say. The audience switches off because there is no reason to watch you when they can read ahead faster than you speak.
How many words should be on a slide?
As few as you can manage, and never more than nine as a working ceiling. The point of the limit is not the number itself but what the number forces: you cannot hide detail on the slide, so you have to carry it with your voice. That is the whole trick. Less text on screen means more attention on you.
Should I use slides at all for a short presentation?
Often you need fewer than you think, and sometimes none. If your session is ten minutes and built on one clear message with a story behind it, you may hold the room better with no deck at all. Slides earn their place when a visual genuinely helps people understand something words alone cannot, like a chart or an image showing the change from one state to another. If a slide is only there so you feel prepared, leave it out.
Where should my call to action go in the deck?
Not on the final slide by default. Attention is usually highest in the middle of a strong section, so that is where a big ask often lands best. The closing slide still gets a clear next step, but do not save your single most important prompt for the moment when part of the room has already started packing up.
How do I stop relying on my slides without panicking?
In stages, never all at once. Replace paragraphs with phrases, then phrases with a single word or image. Practise sections with the screen off until you can deliver them blind. Swap slide dense with texts for stories you have lived yourself, because those cannot be read off a screen. Each step moves a little more weight onto your delivery, so by the time the deck is minimal, you are already carrying the room.
TL;DR: how to avoid death by PowerPoint
You avoid death by PowerPoint by treating the slides as your support act and yourself as the headliner.
Pass the dead projector test: build the presentation around your message first, so you could deliver it with no slides at all.
Structure it as a Nano Speech: open with a hook not an agenda, deliver one clear point at a time, close with a call to action.
Keep each slide to nine words or fewer and one message, then use contrast, numbers, and images to point the eye.
Put your most important ask in the middle where attention peaks, not saved for the final slide.
Wean yourself off the deck in stages by practising sections with the screen off and leaning on real stories.
More from Liam Sandford
Read my book: Effortless Public Speaking. Learn how to speak confidently, reduce stress, and turn public speaking into your competitive advantage. These actionable public speaking tips will help you improve your presentation skills for any audience.
Join the free 5-day email course: Get daily lessons packed with practical strategies to deliver effective presentations and speak confidently. This course is designed to build your public speaking skills step by step. Sign up below: