I recently watched a founder defend a $15M valuation using a raw Excel screenshot as his main slide. He assumed the dense grid proved his analytical rigor. It actually proved he did not know what his core metrics were. When you paste an unformatted spreadsheet into your pitch deck, you force the investor to do the analysis for you. Excel is a tool for calculation. PowerPoint is a tool for communication. They require completely different approaches. I handled a similar problem when designing a selected companies analysis for Citi. The initial draft was a wall of default borders and tiny numbers. The data was accurate, but the narrative was completely buried. We threw out the screenshot and used The Frictionless Data Method. First, we killed the gridlines. Heavy borders add unnecessary visual noise. We let whitespace separate the columns naturally 📐 Then we fixed the alignment. Left-align the text categories. Right-align the financial numbers. This creates a sharp visual edge the human eye processes instantly ⚡ Finally, we anchored the insight. We applied a subtle background fill to the one specific column that justified the valuation. We made the conclusion impossible to miss 🎯 Start here: open your deck and find your densest financial table. Delete the lazy image import. Rebuild it natively, strip away the borders, and highlight the single number that drives your deal.