… but I didn’t have the time.

This famous quote from Mark Twain comes to mind from time to time when working on important documents. This weekend I’m again amazed at how long it takes to make a good 15 minute twenty slide PowerPoint presentation. Throwing together twenty slides of dense text bullets is easy. Forty is easier! Getting twenty graphical slides that succinctly and effectively communicate precisely the right amount of the right information is a daunting and time consuming task.

Figuring out what information is most important to the target audience is tough at the best of times. It is even tougher as an entrepreneur who wants to demonstrate that our team has thought through all the angles on all our key strategies and therefore prove that we know what we are doing. My natural inclination is to dump tons of information on the recipient. However, anyone who has sat through or fallen asleep in a presentation like this knows how badly it fails.

PowerPoints with lots of text-only slides are the kiss of death on the fundraising circuit. But finding or creating graphics that communicate complex topics like Software-as-a-Service and social networking in a single glance is not easy even with all the power of Google at my fingertips.

Enough whining for tonight. I’m happy to say that after quite a few hours, I have five slides done.

More fun tomorrow!