Business presentations usually rely on a few basic concepts. One of them is the snapping chain or rope, where 2 forces pulls something apart. One way to create this is with a stock image of a snapping rope or chain, but it can be hard to find one without an unhelpful 3D rotation, another approach is to create a chain from basic PowerPoint shapes.
Here is what I did
- Take a rectangle with rounded corners
- Increase the rounded corners until they become half circles (the small yellow dot in the shape)
- Copy the shape, make it smaller
- Centre the 2 shapes, subtract the smaller from the bigger
- Apply some 3D bevel to to get the basic chain ring
- The other chain ring is simply a rectangle with rounded corners.
- Now, scribble a “saw” freehand shape.
- Copy a chain ring, subtract the saw shape to get the broken ring
- Copy this broken ring, and subtract it from another ring (to get the exact complement of the break lines)
- Line everything up for the final composition.
You can follow these steps, or download the finished product from the template store.
Once you have your chain, “store it in a safe place”, there are endless ways you could use it in future slides: multiple chains, longer chains, chains that go all around the slide :-) Here is another possible composition from the SlideMagic archive
The resulting chart is not a master piece illustration, but its unpretentious simplicity can do a decent job in an everyday business presentation. People spent too much time dealing with presentation software, and the objective of SlideMagic (the app, the store) is to help you get business concepts on a decent slide quickly and move on with more important things in life (and business).