SlideMagic Blog

Flowboard is a presentation design app for iPad. In the TechCrunch video below, the company CEO gives a quick demo of the product.

I am curious to hear your feedback on designing presentations on a tablet in a new app (using an iPad to display them is a no brainer). I can see the advantages of mobility, the touch interface, but on the other there are drawbacks: screen size, lack of navigation precision, incompatible file formats, and file management problems.

PowerPoint is not very good at creating line breaks in a shape. With lots of space left, it breaks your long word (&lquo;management” is a favourite) to the next line. Two things you can do:

1. Right click the shape, hit format shape, select text box and un-tick the wrap-text-in-shape box. Now you can make your own line breaks
2. For bigger fonts a 1.0 leading between lines is too much. Select the shape, click format, go to paragraph, and set the line spacing to multiple and put in the value 0.8 or 0.9 instead of 1.0.

Web design involves technical skills that a presentation or print designer does not have. At the same time, (if I may say so), presentation/print designers might have a better feeling for page layout (understatement). Yeah, yeah, I agree, on the interactive technology front the geeks still beat us.

I have blogged many times over the past few years about the similarities between web and presentation design.

Most automated web design tools are aimed at small business owners with zero design or software skills: Wix is an example, or look at Striking.ly. So I was pleasantly surprised to discover Webydo that offers a design environment similar to PowerPoint or InDesign and enables presentation/print designers to create some pretty decent web sites.

The company is still in beta, so there is always the risk that your web site might go down with it in case the company does not get traction (that is why I am giving it some publicity here). Also, the software still has some tiny bugs that I am sure will be ironed out in the near future.

Often when I visit a client and we do some on-site slide edits together, I am surprised to see how people suffer from working in PowerPoint because of things that can easily be prevented:

• Make sure you actually see what you do. Make your work area as big as possible, reduce the size of the slide note box to the minimum. If you have a docking station for your laptop, use it to hook up to the big monitor. Ask IT to help sort out a 2-screen configuration, where you can have presentation inputs (an older version with comments) can be on the small screen while you do your edits on the big screen (I went further and work on two 27" monitors, plus the 3rd  small screen of my laptop, one of the best investments I have ever made).
• Write down actions that you use all the time (aligning objects, [un]grouping items, switch to slide sorter view and back, etc.) and spend 20 minutes Googling how to do them using short cuts. Read this old post about how to create the essential PowerPoint toolbar.
• Use a proper mouse and not the IBM/Lenovo red dot
• If your computer is slow, close down windows, applications, de-clutter your machine until you have only the files open that you actually need
• Ask someone in IT to sort out the default settings in your PowerPoint template so that you do not have to look for fonts, colours, etc.

A bug in an Excel spreadsheet influenced the outcome of an economic study. Flawed numbers can lead to bad decisions and/or take the credibility out of your presentation. “If the number on this page is wrong, I might as well have to check the numbers on every page…”

I have built my fair share of models (mostly discounted cash flow valuation models of big companies) and a small bug can make a few billion dollar difference in valuation.

My main strategy against bugs:

• Simple formulas: plus, minus, times, divided by.
• If possible only 2 numbers per formula, intermediate results appear as another line
• Round up to a unit that leaves you with one digit behind the dot (millions, thousands, etc.)
• Everything points down, a result always depends on values higher up in the spreadsheet, never the other way around
• And finally: adhere to the rule that if it looks wrong, it is probably wrong. Averages should be within the minimum and the maximum value, gross margins are usually around 50%, etc. etc.

I was asked to answer this question on Quora the other day. My hypothesis that it does not have anything to do with the preinstalled templates or the software’s underlying capabilities.

I think that on average the population of Keynote users are better designers. If you invested the effort to get to grips with a new presentation design tool, you are probably likely to be able to design better slides.

I have now clocked a significant amount of hours designing slides in Apple Keynote. I love the program, but there are still a few annoyances that cannot be solved by adjusting your slide template or configuring other settings. Hopefully Apple will fix this in a new release (it has been a while):

1. Selecting what you click, not what you cover with your selection triangle
2. Make it easier to fill shapes quickly rather than having to go back to the inspector. I am always struggling with color windows and inspector settings
3. Enable custom toolbars, especially with options to center and align things. Yes, the smart drawing guides are useful, but not useful enough.

A few days ago I wrote about LiveSurface and their set of stock images with blank surfaces to put your own artwork on. On the site, I signed up for their new product: LiveSurface Context (request an invite here). It is a small program that takes care of the 3D manipulation of your artwork in order to fit it on the surface.

The experience is much better than the vanishing point filter in PhotoShop. No more guesswork to draw the guidelines, no more fiddling and copying/pasting to move your artwork. Everything is ultra-precise and with total control for the designer.

A few drawbacks though for the casual designer. You need to have a version of Adobe Illustrator installed on your machine (and more importantly, know the basics of how to work with it). Secondly, the service charges a subscription model that works if you need to use a lot of these compositions, but is not economical for infrequent use. And finally, the library of surface images is smaller than you would find on regular stock image sites.

All in all a good service, and as a professional designer, I might give it a try.

In email, I went from Lotus Notes, to Microsoft Outlook, to gmail. And now it is the turn of the spreadsheet: from Lotus 1-2-3, to Microsoft Excel, to Google Spreadsheets.

Excel has too many features. Even at my time at McKinsey where I built very complex spreadsheet models (mostly company valuations), I only used the very basic functions (numerical operators) to ensure that I completely understand what is going on in the model. Bugs could mean billions of dollars for my clients.

The features come at a price, on my Mac Excel 2011 has annoying delays when entering even the most basic of calculations.

The design of the Google apps have come a long way. Especially for spreadsheets, collaboration with multiple people is important. And finally, the Google spreadsheet is perfectly accessible on a mobile device.

Goodbye Excel.

Zoho is a web app suite targeted at small businesses. One of the apps is Zoho Show, a presentation design suite. Yesterday, I gave it a test ride.

A cutting-edge presentation design tool is not the key selling point of Zoho, it is just one of the components of a broader offering of business software with different benefits: attractive pricing when compared to Microsoft Office, access to your files from any location with an Internet connection, and easy collaboration on documents with colleagues.

You do not notice that the Zoho slide design interface is run in a web browser. Interactions are smooth and fast. The application is designed to resemble Microsoft PowerPoint, menu colors look similar, and menu options are stored in familiar places. Unlike Google Docs, Zoho does allow you to crop images (a very important feature).

The basic PowerPoint user will have no problem working in Zoho Show, with one big exception: the ability to create data charts. In Zoho, you need to create them in the spreadsheet application and port them across using an image. This is an issue for people that live and breath bar and column charts day in, day out. (Google Docs has the same issue, it is probably complicated to include a full spreadsheet chart engine inside a presentation app).

For more advanced presentation designers, there are certain things missing. Template management is poor (same as with Google), and you miss the ability to align objects, snap them together on the screen. Font selections are limited, and as with all web apps it is hard to configure a tool bar for fast access to functions you often need (aligning objects, etc.).