SlideMagic Blog

A technical post about PowerPoint templates today.

When you copy the slides of one PowerPoint presentation into another one, the copied slides get formatted according to the template of the presentation your are copying in. Colours and fonts get adjusted. But the most surprising things happen with text placeholders.

The template I typically use is pretty simple: a blank page with text placeholders for the slide title and footnote to make sure they are anchored in a consistent place across slides. Now the strange thing happens. Because the footnote is the only text placeholder available, PowerPoint starts copying text into the footnote.

To accommodate clients who want to use my template after the presentation design project is over, I now add a plain text box to my template slides. Here is the key thing, make sure that plain text box is the first text place holder you create, that’s where copied text will go. (In other words, remove the footnote, put the text box in, recreate the footnote place holder after that).

If you often experience problems with inconsistent formatting of presentations and the issues with copying slides across you will appreciate the way I designed my presentation app SlideMagic (sign up for the beta here).

• One slide layout grid for all presentations, everything lines up perfectly, always
• No need for template programming
• It is not possible to corrupt a template and having it slowly propagate throughout your company
• Changing the look & feel of a presentation is easy: change your logo and accent colour and you are done (including bar and column charts, try that in PowerPoint)

Adobe is moving to a subscription pricing model for its major software products (Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, etc.). I signed up for a $20 or so monthly introduction offer but then forgot that I got upgraded to around $55 charge after one year. This is probably good value if you use many Adobe products, and use them frequently.

As a presentation designer, I fall in between the typical user segments. Here is how I use Adobe products:

• Acrobat:
  • Stitching together multiple PDFs into one
  • Reducing file sizes of image-heavy PDF files
• Photoshop:
  • Removing backgrounds from images
  • Compressing, re-sizing large image files
  • Putting text on blank 3D objects
• Illustrator: opening, selecting groups, re-coloring of stock vector files before saving them as PNGs.

Is there a combination of alternative software packages that could do these basic functions?

Some responses to an earlier tweet:

Art: Typesetter at the Enschede printing factory (was located behind the St. Bavochurch) in 1884, painting by the American artist Charles Frederic Ulrich.

I am in the process of creating a library of video tutorials for SlideMagic. Here are the first three, you can expand them to full screen size for more detail.

From the 3x3 grid to a basic slide composition

How to clone a template

How to import individual slides from another presentation/template

Art: William Merritt Chase, A Friendly Call, 1895.

Sentences or titles never have the same length, so putting them on a page without some form of framing makes the whole slide look unbalanced. My solution: a light grey background  creates a box that gives structure to the text. You can also use images to reinforce the slide’s grid layout. Many people use an outline, a frame around text for the same purpose. I think a light box fill looks a lot better.

The light grey box is one of the key structuring elements in my presentation design app SlideMagic. Traditional presentation design software is not very well set up to changing grids of text boxes and images. Try doing it in PowerPoint, then try to do the same thing in SlideMagic.

Art: Piet Mondriaan, Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942

When Googling for examples of VC pitch decks, the on that Buffer used to raise $500k in 2013 ranks high. I decided to give it the SlideMagic treatment: how would the deck have looked when the slides would have been created in SlideMagic.

• I changed the slide design to fit SlideMagic
• I did not change the slide content
• I did not change the story flow

I have a few comments on the slides that I have put in the SlideMagic explanation boxes.

Here is the original:

Here is the same deck in SlideMagic. You can clone this presentation to your own SlideMagic account by **clicking this link**and use some of the slide concepts in your own presentations. I have also added this presentation as a template in SlideMagic’s template library.

Art: Johann Zoffany paints a group of Englishmen in Rome for the Grand Tour, united only by their wealth and love of art; unlike most conversation pieces, this was not a commissioned work

Presentation software needs to be absolutely bug free. Unlike a social media mobile app, where you can wait with grazing your news feed for a few hours, the presentation app needs to be ready for that critical 20 minute slot for the all-or-nothing presentation.

That is the reason I am keeping SlideMagic still in beta as I iron out all possible glitches. Here are some we fixed recently. If one of these caused you to stop using the app, give it another try.

• Fixed: small (but annoying) differences in font size rendering between what you see in PDF and what you see on screen, causing words to drop to the next line when you don’t want them to.
• Fixed: erratic font size behaviour when rapidly increasing or decreasing font sizes
• Fixed: enabling multi-edit of cells to manage colours, font sizes of more than one cell in one go.
• Fixed: no need to leave and re-enter the shape format menu to work on another cell
• Fixed: Windows/Firefox UI freezes
• Fixed: story mode drag and drop issues

SlideMagic is moving closer to production stability.

B.t.w, I updated the SlideMagic marketing site yesterday, making the positioning plain and simple: it is easy to make business presentations. Easy, that’s it. Also made the images a bit more daring.

Art: Scène d’été, or Summer Scene, is an oil on canvas painting by Frédéric Bazille, completed in 1869

Ramzi Mrad is entrepreneur in residence at INSEAD and used SlideMagic prepare his presentation of business case: how Roche Pharmaceuticals set the price for its Avastin cancer drug in Europe. This type of presentation is exactly how I envisioned SlideMagic being used. Without any professional support, a layman designer can come up with something pretty decent. You can see his presentation here.

Art: Pierre-Denis Martin (1663–1742), Vue du Château de Fontainebleau (1718-1723)

Recently, I have focussed most of the development work for SlideMagic on improving the workflow. It is the small differences that can make a big difference. Here are two features that you might not have discovered yet:

You can select multiple boxes and edit their design (colours, font size, etc.) at the same time. Great for creating tables quickly or clean up inconsistent font sizes.

In the shape change menu you can tackle multiple shapes in one go. Click another shape and you can adjust its perimeter as well without leaving and re-entering the menu.

You can give SlideMagic a try yourself, the beta version is free to use. Sign up here.

Art: Rabbits by Johann Georg Seitz, subscribe to this blog, follow on Twitter

The preview of the new Microsoft Office 2016 is out (finally) and I have installed it on my production machine letting it do all my presentation design work for clients. (You can download the Office 2016 preview here)

• It looks beautiful. PowerPoint 2016 for Mac looks exactly the same as PowerPoint 2013 for Windows. A calm flat user interface. Working in a beautiful software environment always encourages you to create beautiful presentations.
• The whole interface feels faster, snappier, and smoother, somehow. This is especially true for Excel. The current version of Excel for Mac has a highly annoying latency when entering data in cells.
• Subtle changes to the default colours and fonts. Gone are the boring olive greens of the old PowerPoint colour scheme. Calibri light looks great on Retina displays. Gone are the default gradients and drop shadows. Gone are the tick marks in data charts.
• The commenting infrastructure is nice for collaboration with other people
• Full integration with OneDrive cloud storage (if Microsoft has guts they should add Dropbox as well, and maybe even Google Drive).
• Now PowerPoint gives suggested snap lines to place objects, automatically distributing and aligning things on your screen.
• The grid behaves more normal with a centimeter ruler. If you accidentally move a grid line (yes, this still happens) it is easy to move it back to the right position.
• Now text and shape backgrounds have the exact same colour rendering, an annoying bug in PowerPoint 2011, where despite selecting the same RGB value, colours on text and shapes would render differently.

I was an early user of Evernote on a PC (a couple of years ago) and used it to organise bookmarks for reading later. Then I stopped using it for some reason until recently. Not as a bookmarking service, but to organise life across multiple devices. It has specific advantages over bookmarking sites, Dropbox/Box/iCloud/Google Drive, online presentation apps

• My demo presentations. It is easy to maintain and access a folder with all my demo decks ready and up to date on all my devices. This is the folder that I set to sync/download to my devices so it is available without internet connectivity. I have run pitches on my iPhone to potential clients.
• On the go note taking. Away from the office it is hard to capture stuff and not lose it. I use the Penultimate hand writing app for iPad that gets synced into Evernote. Evernote itself has notes screen where you can jot down quick thoughts (an idea for a blog post for example). The Evernote scan app (Scannable) is perfect for capturing receipts, doodles, and white boards. It is actually faster to search through hand written notes than typed ones.
• Screenshots have become a big part of my design workflow. I just can’t be bothered to convert between different image file formats. Skitch, the Evernote screen shot app has a very used cross hair few that the standard Mac function is missing.

I did not get paid a single $ for writing this (unfortunately).