Most presentations would be better without slides. Because most slides compete against the presenter instead of supporting them. I know what it’s like. A presentation is looming and you leave it late to create slides. And when you do finally open PowerPoint you do the obvious thing: you create slide after slide of bullet points. If you’re short on time, skip the slides. Those rushed slides are bad slides. They are bullet-heavy, text-dense, and hard to follow.

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Here’s why 👇 All those borders are clutter. They get in the way of the message. The vertical lines obviously get in the way of a reader scanning across the rows. If you have your data in columns that are aligned (left for text, right for numbers) then let the white space between columns do the work of the vertical borders. That’s all you need. And you don’t need horizontal borders for every because the data is in rows.

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Modelling behaviour is a core part of leadership. If you’re a finance leader, your presentations should inspire good practice in your team … but too often they inspire mediocrity. When it’s your turn to present, do you: • Ask someone to put together a bullet-point slide deck? • Glance at the slides for the first time just before—or during—the presentation? • Deliver it as though you’re seeing it all for the first time?

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We don’t send original letters back with our replies—so why do we include the full text of every email in our responses? Email systems automatically create message threads. There’s no need to repeat every line of a previous message. Instead: 1. Highlight the sentence or two you’re responding to. 2. Hit return—only the selected text stays visible. 3. Type your reply below it. 4. Send. It’s faster, clearer, and easier to read.

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Tools like ChatGPT and Grammarly are great for catching typos, improving sentence structure, and ensuring grammatical accuracy. But here’s the problem: a grammatically perfect financial report can still be painfully dull. If you wrote a dull report, filled with jargon, passive sentences and unnecessary details then what you will get from AI is a polished, dull report. And if your report reads like a data dump, AI won’t fix that.

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Most people reply to an email by hitting ‘reply’ and typing their answer to the sender’s questions at the top of the email thread (top-posting). This works OK for replies to short emails with a single request, but for longer emails,** try responding inline **instead. This means typing your response directly within the body of the email. Find the sentence you want to respond to, insert a new line (or two) and type your response of comment.

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A: Constraints lead to innovation. The scientists working for DeepSeek didn’t have the money and data centres filled with £30,000 microchips so they had to find a different way to build artificial intelligence models. They did it by asking better questions of the data rather than cramming more and more data through their processors (as I understand it, anyway). You can apply this approach to your writing. The most obvious constraint is time.

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“Not everything that is more difficult is more meritorious.” So said Saint Thomas Aquinas. Let me paraphrase it: not every long document is worth the time it takes to write it and read it. Remember that when it comes to writing your next long-ish document. Think about whether you are making your job harder than it needs to be. Perhaps a short document will meet the need. Perhaps you can write in shorter sentences that take less effort for you to think up, and less effort for your reader to read.

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