How to prepare a last-minute presentation

Last-minute request from your boss? Procrastinated on converting your paper into a presentation? Or maybe you are just short on time? 

If you’re reading this blog post, you need a quick way to prepare a last-minute presentation.

Here is our four step process to create a fantastic presentation in less than one hour, along with all of the tips, tricks, and resources you need to get started right now.

(Fun fact: Did you know intelligent people tend to procrastinate more than the average person? You’re in good company!)

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Write down the key points for your presentation

The first step to making a presentation is not opening up PowerPoint or worrying about how to make your slides look good.

Instead, the first thing you should do before creating any speech, presentation, or talk is to identify your key points. Take 5 minutes to think about your topic and write down the 3-5 things you share with your audience during the presentation. 

If you need some help with figuring out what your key points are, try asking yourself these three questions:

• What is the goal of my presentation? Am I trying to educate, persuade, help someone make a decision?
• What is the one thing I want my audience to remember? If there is only one story, statistic, or piece of information people remember after my presentation, what should it be? 
• What are the best pieces of supporting information for my presentation? Once you know your goal and/or the one thing you want your audience to take away, figure out the best pieces of supporting information to tell your story, make your case, and make a compelling presentation.

Create a presentation

Now that you know what you want to say, it’s a lot easier to figure out how you want to say it. If this is a speech where you use slides as supporting materials, you probably want to create a presentation that supports your talk track. 

There are a few different ways to go about creating a presentation:

• Use an AI presentation maker
• Find an old presentation that you can use as a template
• Find a new presentation template
• Create a presentation from scratch

Given you’re short on time, we’d recommend starting with an AI presentation maker for a first draft of your presentation and then refining the slides to make sure they cover all of your key topics. One of the benefits of using AI is it will help you organize and expand your key points into a cohesive presentation.

Plus AI is an AI presentation maker for PowerPoint and Google Slides, so you can choose to use whichever platform you are more comfortable with. 

To use Plus AI, all you have to do is type in your key points from the first step into the Plus AI prompt window and ask Plus AI to generate a presentation for you.

From there, Plus AI will turn your key points into a presentation outline, and you can review the general structure of the presentation and make any changes to the slides or number of slides.

Once you are happy with the outline, Plus AI will generate the rest of the presentation and provide you with tips on how to further refine your presentation (typically tips for things that the AI could not do itself, such as adding personal anecdotes or more data).

Of course, AI is not perfect, so you should flip through your deck to ensure that:

• The amount of text is appropriate for the type of presentation you are making - Don’t just read off your slides!
• The level of detail is appropriate for your audience - If you need to present to business executives, third graders, PhD students, you can specify that in the AI instructions
• The data is presented in the right format - Picking the right slide type to present information is important. If something is a process, try using a process flow diagram instead of just listing out a few bullets

Once you are happy with the slide deck, it’s time to do your first run through of the presentation.

Record a run through of the presentation

Warning - this is the most difficult part of your presentation preparation, but it is the key to doing effective last-minute presentation prep.

For this step, you’ll get your phone and record yourself through your full presentation, from start to end, presenting each slide. 

Ideally, you can record yourself in an environment that simulates where you will make the final presentation, but at a minimum, record your upper body and screen so you can see your body language and slides at the same time.

Don’t worry about making mistakes or starting over if something goes wrong. Just make a complete end-to-end recording of yourself going through the entire presentation.

When you’re done, treat yourself to a short break before coming back to watch the full video. (I know, this part is definitely the most painful)

Improve the weakest part of the presentation

After you’re done watching the video, identify the weakest part of your presentation… and make it a little bit better.

• If your introduction was boring and you found yourself losing interest, try to find some ways to start your presentation better. 
• If there were some technical details that were hard to understand, find a way to simplify the slides or add new graphics to better support your talk track.
• If you started rambling on one of your slides, refine the key point of that slide and cut out extraneous information or anecdotes.

Chances are, with your one recording, you’ll be able to spot a bunch of areas for improvement, but we recommend just focusing on one or two if you’re short on time. That way you can have the maximum impact on your last-minute presentation prep (and you can always go back for more improvements later)

The most effective way to improve your presentation is to practice, so just by recording and watching yourself once, you’ll make big improvements, and you’ll be ready to wow your coworkers or classmates!

Last minute presentation tips

Here are some quick tips to make your last-minute presentation seem like one that you spent months preparing for:

• Record yourself doing at least one end-to-end run through of your presentation. This will help you identify any weak spots and give you more confidence going in to the real presentation.
• Repeat yourself. It’s always good to have clear talking points for a presentation, but if it’s an unfamiliar topic and you haven’t spent a lot of time practicing, just keep it simple and don’t worry about repeating the same key points over and over.
• Use an AI presentation maker so you don’t have to worry about slides in addition to what you’re going to say. Spend your time on practicing the presentation itself, not wasting time on formatting.
• Don’t say it was a last-minute presentation! Do not start or end your presentation by saying you only prepared it last night. Your audience has no idea, and no one else will know if you missed a point or misstated a minor detail.
• Pretend you’re a great presenter. “Fake it ‘til you make it” is a real thing. Pretend you are the speaker from that great TED talk or that keynote presentation you just watched and imagine you have their confidence when speaking.
• Get started now - once you’re done reading this, go prepare for the presentation!

Last minute presentation ideas

Need ideas for good last-minute presentations? Try to pick something where

• You have a lot of knowledge about the topic
• You have some existing materials that you could turn into a presentation
• You have a great template that you can use

Otherwise, here’s a long list of persuasive presentation ideas and informative speech ideas broken down into categories.

FAQs

• How many slides do I need for a 10 minute presentation? For a 10 minute presentation, you probably need 5-7 slides, depending on the style of presentation.
• How many words per minute do people typically speak during a presentation? TED talk speakers typically speak at a pace of 150 - 200 words per minute. For a normal presentation, 130 - 150 words per minute is a standard presentation pace.
• How can I make a last minute presentation? If you’re short on time, try using an AI PowerPoint maker like Plus AI to make a presentation for you in a few minutes.

Conclusion

If you’re preparing for a last-minute presentation, it’s time to get to work! You should be able to get through our four step process in less than an hour, and we promise your presentation will be 10x better than starting from a blank PowerPoint slide.