Two stuffed suitcases full of clothing and personal items.

Packing a suitcase and preparing a presentation deck are surprisingly similar.

When people plan for a trip, they often imagine every possible scenario—every weather situation, every potential travel mishap, every activity—and think that they should prepare for it all. As a result, they wind up overpacking their suitcases. Then they spend the whole trip lugging around all kinds of excess options, regretting how much they chose to take with them, when instead they would have been much better off bringing only the essential items.

This same mindset extends to presentations. Worried that audiences may want more details or ask questions, people typically add extra tables, graphs, and slides. Before you know it, they have way more slides than they can effectively talk through, and they wind up regretting having included way more information than was necessary.

Both scenarios are entirely understandable, but also problematic. And while I can't help you pack a lighter suitcase—I, too, am a chronic overpacker—I can share tips and tricks for crafting shorter presentations.

My favorite helpful tip is to use hidden slides—and use them frequently.

Hidden slides in a presentation deck are fully editable, but aren't visible by default when you present. The beauty is that you can still access them while presenting. Unlike an appendix full of backup slides, you can place hidden slides in the flow of the presentation for easy access. Hidden slides are the perfect solution for adding content to your presentation in anticipation of audience questions, because they are there when you need them, but stay hidden if you don’t.

Let's look at a couple of instances where I used hidden slides.

At a workshop last week, someone asked about my thoughts on combination charts (also known as secondary y-axis charts). For context, combination charts are not one of my go-to graph types, and they aren't included in our regular workshop content. That said, combination charts are common, so workshop attendees often wonder why they don't see them mentioned.

This question has been raised so frequently that I have the answer memorized, and I typically like to share alternative options to avoid combination charts. I could consider making a few slides and adding this to the standard workshop content. But if I did this for every question asked, the workshop slides would drag on for way too long. This is where hidden slides come in handy.

The impact is quite slick and impressive to the audience. If someone asks about combination charts, I can magically share the slide. However, if the question never comes up, then the presentation keeps moving, and I don't risk sharing information that isn't relevant to my audience.

Here's a quick screenshot from PowerPoint’s Presenter View showing the hidden slides that I described. Notice how the slides are less saturated and have a symbol on top to indicate that they are hidden.

Screenshot of presenter view in PowerPoint showing two hidden slides.

Let's consider another instance of helpfully hidden slides.

Last week I gave a 20-minute presentation at our weekly team meeting on the performance of our YouTube channel. I shared a graph of our net new subscribers by month, going back to October 2021. (The version below is anonymized for humor.)

Simple line graph showing YT subscribers by month.

The goal was to provide a baseline understanding of key metrics, but then move quickly into specific video performance and future planning. I anticipated that my audience would want to discuss the October spike, even though it wasn’t immediately critical to my planned narrative. My solution: create two hidden slides.

When the anticipated question came, I was prepared. I quickly switched to the hidden slides, which enabled me to facilitate a more meaningful discussion about October, and then returned seamlessly to the main story I had intended to tell.

That's the beauty of these helpfully hidden slides. You can take a detour in your presentation without losing control. Feel free to answer a question and show your audience that you've done the work, but then guide everyone back to the primary narrative.

I encourage you to experiment with using hidden slides in the future as a way to streamline your presentations. If you’ve used hidden slides before, let us know in the comments down below.