[polar]

I'm in a technical white collar industry, and recently moved into a role where I run lots of internal and external meetings. Audiences span a variety of business and IT segments. The material covers lots of technical minutia, so each meeting requires at least one or two slides. Not much of the content can be recycled.

The format set by the powers that be squeezes in a lot of content per page - intro generally contains technical info (50-100 words across bullets and categories) followed by supporting tables and data figures. Materials have to be able to stand alone and can't be diluted with vector graphics or cutesy colors.

I'm spending too much time on determining what to include and exclude, put together the content, distilling key points, and to a lesser extent, formatting (moving shit around as the content changes on the page and spills into extra lines). Frankly, I freeze up when I get in front of a blank slide.

I know hotkeys and what most of the buttons do, including alignment. My strong point is data analysis and knowing the ins and outs, not distilling key points.

Any suggestions on technical presentation design guides and speeding up the process? Links would be helpful.

Thanks.