There are many ways to wreck a PowerPoint slide. Behold these before-and-after gems from some of the worst train wrecks we've ever seen.

At the Presentation Summit, a gathering of some of the most passionate and vested presentation professionals in the world, guess how many of the attendees consider themselves professional designers. We know because we asked: less than 30%. Out in the world, where 65 million PowerPoint presentations are created each day, the percentage drops to around 5%. And yet, we are asked to design presentations every single day. No wonder “Death by PowerPoint” is in everyone’s vocabulary.

This session will not show you how to become a brilliant designer; that is an affront to the people who really are. More important, this session will help you get by with the skills that you do have, by showing you makeovers of slides that do not require a degree in the arts, and in fact were performed by a member of that massive majority not possessing one.

These are before-and-after examples of real slides, created by real people, for real circumstances. They carry the hope that you will watch them and think to yourself, “Hey, I can do that, too.”

• When and how to illustrate a slide
• How best to utilize white space
• Using transparent shapes—best problem solver ever
• When to animate and when not to
• Decluttering and deuglifying

Rick Altman has been hired by hundreds of companies, listened to by tens of thousands of professionals, and read by millions of people, all of whom seek better results with their presentation content and delivery. He covers the whole of the industry, from message crafting, through presentation design, slide creation, software technique, and delivery. He is the host of the Presentation Summit, now in its 16th season as the most prominent learning event for the presentation community.

Away from the conference, he regularly leads private presentation skills development workshops within organizations and is working on the fourth edition of the popular and provocatively-titled Why Most PowerPoint Presentations Suck, and how you can make them better.

Altman came to presentations through publishing and graphic design. He claims to have invented desktop publishing back in 1982 and can show a galley sheet of type that was produced by connecting his Osborne 1 computer to a typesetter across town with a 300-baud modem (that cost $800). An avid sportsman, he was not a good enough tennis player to make it onto the professional tour. All the rest of this has been his Plan B…