SlideMagic Blog

Drones enable a new type of photograph by amateur photographers. A lower camera position than areal photos taken by planes, a higher camera position than what is typically possible from a rooftop, pictures that look down outside of big mountain ranges or dense high rise cityscapes. So you get that sense of perspective, but are still close enough to get very rich detail.

But most importantly: the lens can look 180 degrees down, which is very hard to do from a building or plane. The photos that are starting to emerge are beautiful and I assume we will see them a lot in presentations and other marketing materials.

On a few occasions, I had to use a combination of a cluster and a stack chart. This chart is not available as a standard option in PowerPoint. Here is how to make it:

• Create a regular stacked column chart
• Set the gap width to 0
• Blank out the data where you want the gap between the years to be
• Manually add labels for each of the years

You can create one yourself using the above ingredients, or you can download the one I made in the SlideMagic template store:

Many users of the SlideMagic presentation app ask for the slides that the app generates in PowerPoint format. In response, I have built a SlideMagic presentation slide template store. The basic store infrastructure is finished, but the amount of slides available is still small.

It was quite interesting to see how in 2017 it is possible for a designer to pull of a full-fledged digital content eCommerce store with downloads and payment processing in a matter of days. (OK, my computer science engineering degree came in handy a few times when I had to go deep into HTML to customise the store template in a few places). A few years ago I was toying with the same idea, but the required investment in technology would have been a lot higher.

The main shortcoming of PowerPoint templates vs my presentation design app also applies to my own template store: templates are hard to customise. Adding a row of boxes to an existing design and getting everything to line up properly requires a bit of design skill. It is a trade off you have to make. The app is free to use, and makes these adjustments really easy. Where possible I will add slide variants to accommodate the layman designer where possible.

There are thousands of presentation template stores on the Internet and I tried to make mine different. All stores try to hard: designs are too sophisticated, full supporting graphical clutter that makes slides hard to customise and hard to fit in to corporate templates. My slides are incredibly simple and should blend in nicely when pasted into another corporate colour scheme.

The US patent office has awarded me a patent on parts of the SlideMagic user interface, I am very excited!

Microsoft has been adding some new features in Excel recently (I am using the Mac version). I am so used to working with the software that I rarely look at new feature additions, unless they are staring me in the face.

One of buttons that got my attention are Bing maps: you can now plot data on locations in a map. You enter a table with locations and a numeric value, and they get plotted in the appropriate location. The map zooms in and out. When you drag the map from Excel into PowerPoint, it becomes a static image of the last zoom level.

I think this is very useful as an analysis tool for for example a retailer who wants to visualise stock levels across its stores.

The implementation on a Mac is still a bit crude: it would be great if you could shade entire countries based on a value, conditional formatting. (I see that the Windows version is much more advanced).

Also, the graphical appearance of a Bing map is not designed with a presentation in mind. The map has lots of unnecessary clutter, and random geographical labels are displayed depending on zoom level, pretty much like the map you are staring at when the in-flight entertainment system is switched of just before your plane lands.

Hopefully the Mac version will be upgraded to the features of the Windows version soon.

Use these 2 ways of stretching objects in PowerPoint to your advantage. One will make objects closer together, the other maintains the spacing between them. I never paid much attention to this in the first 2 decades of presentation design, but after noticing it, it has proven very useful over the past weeks. Better late than never.

Tech product pitches are different for a enterprise IT purchase officer and an investor.

The purchasing department might be interested in the full list of user benefits, a detailed description of the features, all written in a language that sounds familiar and resembles the one that is used by the billion dollar tech giants, creating a sense of security that they are dealing with a stable product company that knows what it is doing.

The investor is probably too impatient to read through long tech marketing copy highlighting benefits such as productivity, efficiency, scalability, central dashboards. Yes, there is one box to tick whether the company is able to sell to corporate IT departments, but the bigger question is whether this technology fills a big enterprise need that should be very easy to explain. On the back of that, it should be logical to understand why existing players have not/could not have solved this.

Marketing pitch <> Investor pitch.

Image via WikiPedia

See fragments from it here:

It is easy to say “haha” now that we are in 2017, and think of all those VCs in 2001 that missed this “great” opportunity. Remember, Netflix actually struggled for a long time, even after their IPO. And back in 2001, there were other companies that could pursue Netflix’ business (Blockbuster itself, Amazon). Not an obvious investment decision then.

Leaving the content aside, you can still learn from this email pitch. It is incredibly personal, even informal and it does a good job in explaining the whole business in just a few sentences. A big bold slide deck full of stats about how people are switching from tape to DVD, would not have done a better job.

Image by Marit & Toomas Hinnosaar on Flickr

Financial projections of new business ideas are totally made up / not accurate, so being of by a few million here and there would not matter? We can make quick changes in our financials in the presentation slides, and then “forget” about updating our financials spreadsheet with the new information.

While the absolute numbers of your financial model might be totally pulled out of the hat, it is the thought process of how you got to them that is still valuable for investors. How does your business model work? What would I have to believe in order for your year-5-dream-scenario to come true?

And that model should be consistent across all your documents: presentations, spreadsheets, budgets, everything:

• Discrepancies make you look sloppy (a little preview of things to come when you need to work together with an investor on a Board)
• A consistent model of totally made up numbers makes sure that everything is, well, consistent. If you just slashed sales & marketing cost by 50% but maintain the same amount of sales people, something goes wrong.
• Inconsistencies make it harder to understand your story for an outsider. If sales are $50m on one page and $49m on another people get confused. You established “$50m” as a mental shortcut for year-5-sales-in-the-most-optimistic-scenario, and all of a sudden you create a new shortcut.

So, even if nobody can predict the future accurately. there is still value to create a consistent financial model the same way as you would for a business in which you know every single detail (next year’s budget of an established company for example).

I am on a short break at the moment do not maintain a blog post pipeline to pretend that I am working 365 days a year. I will start posting again soon when I am back at my desk. Sorry…