What should be included in a presentation?

When deciding what should be included in a presentation, focus on the information your audience needs to understand, learn, decide, or act on. For Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), the harder part is usually deciding what to leave out.

An SME usually has no shortage of material. There are examples, background details, exceptions, data points, explanations, and useful context. The problem is deciding which of those things belongs in this presentation, for this audience, on this day.

A presentation has a specific job to do. It’s not a transfer of everything you know. The audience may need to understand an issue, learn something new, or make a decision. The content should be shaped around that job.

Key Insights

• Expertise creates a filtering problem. The more you know, the more choices you have to make about what not to include.
• Audience needs are not the same as audience interests. Useful content helps people understand, decide, or act.
• Different presentation purposes need different levels and types of detail. A briefing, an explanation, and a decision-support presentation should not be built the same way.
• Extra detail has a cost. Even relevant information can weaken a presentation when it competes with the main message.
• Good preparation reduces the need to improvise. Strong structure gives the presenter room to respond naturally without abandoning the plan.

Why Knowing Your Subject Can Make a Presentation Harder to Plan

It can be hard to recognize when we’ve overloaded a presentation because every extra detail may feel justified to the person who knows the topic best. This is especially true when we want the audience to see that we understand the subject thoroughly.

A 2023 study by Tullis and Feder looked at what happens when people estimate how much other people know. Across four experiments, learning additional information made participants less accurate when estimating the knowledge of people who had not learned that information. The researchers describe this as a “curse of knowledge”: what we know can interfere with our ability to judge what someone else knows.

To be clear, the study was not about workplace presentations, so we shouldn’t stretch the finding too far. It does help explain a familiar planning problem, though. Once you know a topic deeply, it becomes harder to see it from the perspective of someone encountering only part of that information.

You may assume certain background knowledge is obvious. You may include context because you know why it matters, even though the audience doesn’t need it. Or you may spend too long explaining details because they’re interesting to you.

The practical issue is not expertise itself. It’s the filtering. One role of presentation skills training is helping people make those filtering decisions deliberately rather than relying on instinct.

What Does Your Audience Need From This Presentation?

Before deciding what goes into a presentation, define what the audience needs from it.

As simple and obvious as that may sound, this question is often skipped. People start with their notes, an old deck, a template, or a blank PowerPoint file. They begin collecting material before they have decided what the material needs to accomplish.

A better starting point is to ask:

• What does this audience already know?
• What do they need to understand by the end?
• What matters most to them?
• What might confuse them?
• What do they need to remember afterwards?
• Is there something they need to decide or do?
• Is there anything I should leave out because it could distract or confuse this audience?

Accessibility Standards Canada‘s plain-language standard takes a similar audience-first approach. It recommends identifying what the audience needs and wants to know, what they will find most important, what they already know, and what they need to do with the information. It also distinguishes between information that is most important, necessary, supplementary, already known, or not needed.

That framework applies well to presentation planning because it forces a useful decision: just because information is relevant does not mean it belongs in the presentation.

Once those decisions are made, the structure becomes easier to build.

How the Purpose Changes What You Include

There is no single formula for how much detail belongs in a workplace presentation. Business presentations serve different purposes, and the right amount of detail depends partly on what the presentation is supposed to accomplish and the time allotted.

If the purpose is to inform

An informative presentation helps people understand a situation, development, result, or update.

The audience usually needs the main facts, enough context to interpret them, and a clear sense of what matters. A project update, for example, does not need every activity completed since the last meeting, nor does it need a transcript of the call with the developer. It needs the information that helps the audience understand progress, changes, risks, and next steps.

The filtering question is:

What does this audience need to know to understand the situation accurately?

If the purpose is to educate

An educational presentation has a different job. The audience needs enough explanation to understand a concept, process, policy, tool, or approach well enough to use or remember it.

That may require more context, examples, definitions, repetition, or sequencing than an informational briefing.

The filtering question becomes:

What does the audience need to understand before the next idea will make sense?

That distinction matters. Cutting too aggressively can make an educational presentation harder to follow, especially when the audience has little prior knowledge. But including too much can make it harder for the audience to identify and process what matters most, let alone remember it.

If the purpose is to facilitate decision-making

A decision-focused presentation needs to help people evaluate something.

That may include the issue, relevant evidence, viable options, trade-offs, risks, constraints, and a recommendation. Background information belongs only where it helps the audience understand the choice in front of them. Background information can sometimes be moved to a separate document, handout, or resource, keeping the presentation focused while giving people access to more detail if they need it.

The filtering question is:

What information does the audience need to make this decision responsibly?

Persuasion can also be a presentation purpose, particularly when a presenter needs others to support a recommendation or course of action. That requires a somewhat different approach. Our material on persuasive presentations deals more directly with that situation.

Presentations can also be designed primarily to entertain or inspire. Those are legitimate purposes, but they fall outside the scope of this article.

What Should Be Included in a Presentation?

Deciding what belongs in a presentation is ultimately a judgement exercise. Some information is essential, some provides useful context, and some is better left out.

How to Decide What Goes in Your Presentation

A useful way to filter material is to sort it into four groups.

1. Essential to the purpose

This is the material the audience needs in order for the presentation to do its job.

If you removed it, the audience might misunderstand the issue, miss an important point, or lack something needed to act or decide.

This material deserves the clearest treatment and the strongest position in the presentation.

2. Helpful context

Some information makes the main content easier to understand without being central to it.

A short explanation of how a problem developed may help an audience interpret the current situation. A brief example may make a new process easier to grasp.

Context earns its place when it makes the essential material clearer. Be careful about not going too deep or too wide. What matters is not only whether the context is useful, but when the audience needs it.

3. Better kept for questions or supporting material

This category is especially useful for subject-matter experts.

You may have technical detail, supporting calculations, background history, additional examples, or exceptions that could matter if someone asks about them. They don’t necessarily need airtime in the main presentation.

Keeping that material available rather than presenting it immediately does two things. It protects the flow of the presentation and leaves you prepared for questions.

4. Interesting, but unnecessary

This is often the hardest category.

The information may be true. It may be relevant to the general subject. You may even find it fascinating.

But if it doesn’t help this audience understand, learn, or decide, it probably doesn’t belong.

Being related to the topic is only the first test. Content earns a place when it supports the purpose of the presentation.

Research on multimedia learning also gives us reason to be careful about adding information simply because we can. Extra material can compete for limited attention and processing capacity, although the effect depends on the audience and the way information is presented.

Ask yourself this question: If I remove this, does the audience lose something they need to understand, decide, or act?

Why Should You Plan the Message Before Building the Slides?

While teaching a large construction company in the Ottawa area, one participant compared planning a presentation to asking a carpenter to pick up a hammer and start nailing two-by-fours together before knowing what he’s building. That’s obviously unreasonable, yet when we design presentations, we often start building them before we have a plan.

A title slide leads to an agenda slide. Then comes a background slide, perhaps copied from an earlier deck. Soon the presentation has a shape, but the shape has been determined by the slides rather than by the audience and purpose.

Planning the message first reverses that process.

Before building slides, decide:

1. What the presentation needs to accomplish.
2. What the audience already knows.
3. What they need from you.
4. Which points are essential.
5. What order will make those points easiest to follow.

Only then should you decide what belongs on a slide.

That doesn’t mean slides need to be sparse for the sake of being sparse. Nor does it mean text, data, or detailed visuals are inherently poor choices. Peer-reviewed work on multimedia learning shows that the effects of visual load and redundant information vary depending on the material, presentation format, prior knowledge, and characteristics of the audience.

The better question is whether the slide helps the audience process the point being made.

A chart may explain something faster than a paragraph. A short phrase may help people track a complex explanation. A detailed table may be useful when the audience needs to inspect the numbers.

Slides work best after those communication choices have already been made.

What Should Presentation Skills Training Help You Practise?

Knowing that you should focus on the audience is one thing. Doing it consistently is harder.

Planning a workplace presentation involves several decisions at once. You need to interpret the audience, clarify the purpose, filter what you know, organize the message, decide what belongs on screen, and then deliver it effectively.

A repeatable planning process reduces the need to solve all of that in the moment.

Effective presentation skills training can provide a structured setting to practise those decisions, see where a presentation is carrying too much information, and learn how planning, structure, slides, and delivery work together.

PMC Training’s Presentation Skills: From Planning to Delivery is the next step for professionals who regularly present updates, recommendations, technical information, or other workplace content and want a more deliberate approach to planning and delivery.