What is storyboarding a presentation?

Sketches before slides

A presentation storyboard is a set of rough frames, one per slide, each carrying the slide's headline and a quick drawing of what it will show. The drawings are deliberately crude: a rectangle for a photograph, a few bars for a chart, a large numeral for a single statistic. Laid out together, they let the author judge things slide software hides: whether six slides in a row are all bullet lists, whether the most important number arrives too late, whether a section has three slides where one would do. Because each frame takes seconds to redraw, the author can try several versions of the sequence in the time it takes to format a single slide.

Where the technique comes from

Storyboards come from film and animation, where directors sketch shots in sequence to plan a scene before filming. Presentation trainers adapted the idea for slides. Cliff Atkinson's Beyond Bullet Points, published by Microsoft Press in several editions, builds its method around it: its principles include nail down the story before the slides and think like a storyboard, and the book walks through sketching the slides of a presentation before applying layouts and graphics. Nancy Duarte's training offers a course on structuring and storyboarding a talk. Many presentation coaches recommend doing the first storyboard away from the computer entirely.

What a storyboard catches

Seeing the whole deck at once exposes monotony, such as a wall of identical text slides. It exposes pacing problems, such as a short talk that spends half its frames on background. It shows whether visuals match claims: a frame with the headline costs doubled and a sketch of a pie chart is visibly wrong before anyone builds the pie. It also helps teams: a storyboard on a wall or a shared board lets several people rearrange slides together, which is far harder when the deck exists only as a file.

Common mistakes

The first is storyboarding without a storyline, so the sketches illustrate topics rather than an argument. The second is drawing too carefully, which turns a quick planning tool into slow design work and makes frames hard to throw away. The third is skipping the step back: a storyboard only helps if the author looks at the whole sequence and changes it. The fourth is one frame per topic instead of one frame per slide, which hides how long the deck really is. The fifth is ignoring the storyboard once building starts, so the final slides drift from the plan.

Storyboards for training and video

Storyboarding is especially useful for training sessions, where the rhythm of explanation, activity and check matters as much as content, and for presentations that will be recorded, where each frame also maps to what the presenter says and does on camera. In both cases the storyboard is also the easiest document to share with a subject matter expert, who can comment on the flow without needing to open slide software. For a training course, the board also shows at a glance how long learners go without doing anything themselves. A run of eight explanation frames with no activity or question among them is a visible warning that attention will fade, and the fix, inserting a short exercise, costs one sticky note.

Where it shows up in the product

There is no separate storyboard view here, but the pieces map closely. Each sketched frame corresponds to a slide role among the 26, such as a big number to metrics, two columns to comparison, a sequence to process, and choosing the role first narrows the templates to ones that match the sketch. From Library in the slide rail adds a shell slide with placeholder text in the right shapes, and slides can be dragged to reorder in the rail; below 1024 pixels wide the editor becomes a vertical feed of every slide with drag to reorder. The customer training example on this site follows a storyboard like rhythm of explanation, practice and checks.

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