How to fix a text-heavy deck

Almost everyone has made a text-heavy deck. It usually happens for good reasons. You wanted to be thorough, you were worried about forgetting something, or the slides started life as a report. The result is the same: an audience reading ahead while you talk, and you competing with your own slides.

The good news is that a wordy deck is one of the easiest problems to fix, because the content is already there. You don’t need new ideas. You need to sort the ones you have into what belongs on screen, what belongs in your voice and what belongs in a handout. Here’s a calm, slide-by-slide way to do it.

Find the heaviest slides first

Don’t start on slide one and work forwards. You’ll spend your energy on the opening and run out of time before the slides that need the most help.

Instead, switch to the slide sorter or grid view and look at the deck from a distance. The heavy slides are easy to spot: grey blocks of text with no clear shape. Mark them. Then, for each marked slide, ask one question: is this slide meant to be presented, or read? If it’s genuinely a reference page, such as a detailed table someone will study later, move it to an appendix or a handout. Everything else gets the treatment below.

If you want a rough sense of where the line sits, how many words per slide is too many gives practical ranges for presented slides.

Pull the point out of the paragraph

Every text-heavy slide is hiding a single sentence that matters most. Your job is to find it.

Read the slide and finish this sentence: “The one thing I need people to remember from this slide is…” Write your answer as the slide title. For example, a slide titled “Survey findings” with eight bullets might become “Most students found the evening slots easier to attend”.

Now go back through the body text and keep only what supports that title. Usually that’s two or three phrases, a number, or one example. The rest isn’t wrong. It just isn’t needed on screen.

Give the leftovers somewhere to go

The hardest part of cutting text is the worry that you’re throwing away work. You’re not. You’re moving it.

• Speaker notes are the right home for explanations, context and the sentences you want to say out loud. Write them in your own speaking voice, not as a script to read.
• Backup slides after your closing slide can hold detail you might need in questions.
• A handout or follow-up document is better than slides for anything people need to study, like full methods, long definitions or reference tables.

Once each piece of text has a home, deleting it from the main slide feels much less risky.

Turn lists into something people can see

Lists are where many text-heavy decks get stuck. A list of six bullets is hard to hold in your head, but many lists have a shape you can show instead:

• Steps in order become a simple numbered flow, with a word or two per step.
• A comparison becomes two columns or a small table.
• A change over time becomes a chart with one highlighted line.
• Parts of a whole become a few labelled boxes.

You don’t need to be a designer for this. Even simple shapes and short labels are easier to follow than the same words in a list. If you’d like layouts to start from, a set of visual slide layouts that replace bullet lists can give you ideas for comparisons, steps and highlights.

When a slide really needs words, arrange them with care. Group related phrases, leave space between groups and use size to show what matters most. There’s a useful walkthrough on formatting your ideas on a slide if you want to practise that step by step.

Split rather than squeeze

Sometimes a slide is heavy because it’s doing two or three jobs. In that case, cutting won’t help. Splitting will.

Give each point its own slide with its own title. Three light slides are faster to present than one crowded slide, because the audience understands each one at a glance and you aren’t waiting for them to finish reading. If you’re worried about your slide count going up, remember that the time you spend talking is what matters, not the number of slides.

Resist the urge to shrink the font so everything fits. If text only fits at a size nobody at the back can read, the slide still has too much on it. Font size rules for readable slides explains why smaller text rarely solves the problem.

A before-and-after you can copy

Here’s an illustrative example from a student project deck.

Before: Title “Methodology”. Seven bullets describing the survey, the sample, the dates, the questions, the tools used, two limitations and a note about ethics approval.

After: Three slides.

1. “We surveyed students across three campuses over two weeks”, with a simple timeline.
2. “Ten questions covered timing, cost and travel”, with the three question themes as labelled boxes.
3. “Two limits to keep in mind”, with two short phrases.

The tools and ethics note moved to the speaker notes and a backup slide. Nothing was lost, and each slide now takes seconds to understand.

Check it with fresh eyes

When you’ve worked through the marked slides, go back to the grid view. The deck should look lighter, with more space and fewer grey blocks. Then rehearse it out loud. You’ll notice quickly whether your notes give you enough to say, and whether any slide still pulls attention away from you. If a section is beyond saving, you can rebuild those slides with AI from your speaker notes and then look at the grid again.

Be patient with yourself. Fixing a text-heavy deck takes a couple of passes, and each one makes the next easier. PPT Grader can also point to the slides that still look dense, so you know where to spend your next pass.