SlideMagic Blog

Presentations and PowerPoint are an integral part of corporate suffering in cubicles, the reason why they get featured often in Dilbert cartoons. Here is today’s cartoon.

A reminder of the excellent post by PowerPoint Ninja back in 2009 with dozens of cartoons on the subject. In exchange for using the comic, here is an (affiliate) link to everything Dilbert on Amazon.

UPDATE. After a comment by Rowan below: the Dilbert site is now searchable, and you can actually buy comics for your PowerPoint presentation, for a reasonable price. As an example, here is a search for all PowerPoint-related Dilbert cartoons going all the way back to 1989.

Call me a nit picker, but I always feel this urge to fix the direction of a connecting line or an arrow pointing to an object in a slide, or to position an object exactly where it feels right.

Intuitively, I am looking for the centroid of a shape. Running complex mathematical analysis every time you need to place an object on your slide would be overkill, however, keep the concept in mind.

PowerPoint does not have the rich image clipping and cropping tools that PhotoShop has. To take the background out of an image, you can set its background color to transparent and hope that the image edge come out reasonably clean.

Jose Arriaga recently started blogging about presentations on PowerPoint Symphony. He discusses an original alternative method: drawing a shape similar to an image and then fill it with the source picture as a background. Full details in his post here.

Increasingly, I use color schemes in Excel models as well. While I am about to switch to Microsoft Office 2010, I find that the majority of my clients (especially the large corporate ones) are still on Office 2003. Buried down in the Excel menus is a feature to set the colors that Excel 2003 users will see when they open files created in Excel 2007.

1. Click the office button
2. Go to the bottom and select “Excel options”
3. Select “save”
4. Click the “colors” button under “preserve visual appearance of the workbook”

Most images have the perspective of someone who, well, stands up and look around. These 2 different ads (one here, and another one here) reminded me to look out for unusual compositions to keep your slides interesting.

Via Ads of the World.

The majority of presentations I see use “he” when referring to a customer, an employee, a user, a patient. I decided to use “she” whenever I can to compensate for this. Maybe you can as well.

Most of my work is confidential, but there are some exceptions. An example is this presentation by Qelp, a startup based in The Netherlands that offers an online, picture-based, mobile phone support engine for operators. The people of Qelp have good presentation skills themselves, so I work more on a coaching basis: they deserve part of the credit for this presentation.

Smartphones and 3G internet: the perfect storm?

Watching the disputes between players and the referee in the soccer worldcup reminds me of corporate negotiations. After the pitch presentation people start discussing the terms. Often, they are so preoccupied with their own viewpoint that they forget to listen or try to understand what the other party is saying. The same points get repeated, and repeated, and “let me explain to you one more time…”. Nobody is listening, everyone gets annoyed.

A reader asked me in the comments of my post on the Pulse News iPad app what feeds I put in there. Here are some sites for daily creative inspiration:

• Ads of the world
• Fubiz
• FFFFound
• Junk charts
• Strange maps
• Behance
• Flowing data
• Advertising is good for you
• Information aesthetics
• The big picture
• Yay! Everyday
• swissmiss
• Ad Freak
• Advertising/Design goodness
• Noisy decent graphics

Please let me know what sources I am missing here.

Here is a big sentence on the front page of a new web site targeted at iPhone users:

[Company] develops real-time personal discovery and contextualization technologies that leverage semantics and social attention to make social streams more relevant.

Industry insiders might understand what it means, but most people will not. I am not a big believer in mission statements. Often, the big wordy sentence that covers all will be the most compact way you can describe your business to yourself, but as you suffer from the curse of knowledge, other people will not get it.