The problem with most decks is not that they are ugly. It is that the slide titled Q3 Performance does not say what the third quarter did, the chart has eleven colours and no point, and the person presenting has to explain in speech what the slide should have said on its own. This is a working day on fixing that: the argument first, then the slide, then the chart.
You work on two things throughout. The first is a supplied deck, a quarterly report of the kind circulated in most organisations, which you take apart and rebuild. The second is your own deck, if you bring one, which you apply the same treatment to in the exercises. You start by writing the point of the deck in one sentence and rebuilding the slide order to support it, then rewrite every headline so it states the finding rather than naming the topic. Slides that carry four ideas get cut down to one, and you decide where the rest goes: the appendix, the notes, or nowhere.
The afternoon is charts. You choose the chart from the question being asked rather than from the icon row, build it in Excel or Google Sheets, and then strip it: gridlines out, legend replaced with direct labels, bars sorted, axis starting where it honestly should. You apply a colour rule that survives a projector and a colour-blind reader, which mostly means one accent colour for the point and grey for everything else, and you learn when a table or a single large number beats a chart entirely. Every chart you finish is annotated so that a colleague who was not in the room can read it and reach the same conclusion.
You also build the thing that saves the most time afterwards: a slide master and theme with a type scale, a colour palette and a grid, so the next deck starts consistent instead of being made consistent. The day ends with the delivery mechanics that decide how a deck lands: speaker notes, timing, the difference between the version you present and the version you send, and exporting a PDF that still looks right on someone else's machine.
The class is taught in PowerPoint and Google Slides, with charts built in Excel or Google Sheets. Work in whichever pair you use at your desk; everything demonstrated exists in both. Sessions run live online in your own timezone or in the classroom in Colombo, with the recording available for twelve months. Pricing is shown in LKR for learners in Sri Lanka and in USD for everyone else, organisations can be invoiced, and a private run can be taught entirely on your own reporting deck and brand template.
