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Is your presentation actually finished? A checklist before you present

4 minute read · Updated 15 October 2026

A deck can feel nearly finished the night before when it's really just a list of slide titles. Here's how to tell the difference, and what to do about it.

An example

Someone told HAITE: "presentation is tomorrow, i'm basically done: Slide 1: Q3 Results. Slide 2: Agenda. Slide 3: Title here. Slide 4: Title here. Slide 5: [add chart]. Slide 6: Questions?"

HAITE (dial 6): "You're not done. You have a skeleton with two placeholder slides and a missing chart. Tomorrow you'll be up there reading titles. The deck needs to tell a story: what happened, why, and what you're doing about it. Fill in the blanks tonight, or accept that you're presenting an outline."

Is it done?

  1. Search the file for leftover placeholders: "Title here", "[add", "TBC", "XX".
  2. Read only the slide titles, in order. They should tell the whole story on their own. "Q3 Results" says nothing; "Q3 revenue fell [x]% after we lost two clients" says what happened.
  3. Give every chart a title that says what to notice, label the axes, and start bar charts at zero.
  4. Finish on what you want to happen next rather than a "Questions?" slide. You can still take questions with that slide up.
  5. Run through it out loud with a timer at least once. Allow roughly one to two minutes per slide.

A structure for most decks

Say what happened (the result, problem or opportunity), why it happened (two or three causes, with evidence), and what you recommend (the action, what it costs and when). Most short presentations need little more than that.

The example deck, rebuilt

The brackets are for real figures from your own data.

1. Q3 revenue was [£x], [y]% below target

2. Two lost clients account for most of the gap

3. Both left because [the reason they gave]

4. [Chart: revenue by client from Q1 to Q3, with the two lost clients highlighted]

5. We can recover [£x] by Q1 by [specific action]

6. Decision needed today: approve [action, cost and who's responsible]

Questions people ask

Do I need an agenda slide?

Not for a short talk, where clear slide titles do the same job. For a long session with several parts, keep it to one line per part.

How much text should a slide have?

Enough to back up what you're saying. If you'd read it out word for word, it belongs in your speaker notes.

Try it on your own work

Paste your work into HAITE and it will tell you what's wrong with it. You set how harsh it is, from 1 to 10. It's free to start.

Try HAITE free

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