SlideMagic Blog

A company brand has at least 3 audiences:

• Employees (including the founders), that need an inspiring and cool place to work
• Users that are looking for a brand that fits and appeals to the target market
• Investors who are looking at a fundable organization with fundable founders

Think about conflicting requirements when picking your name. Priorities might also change over time. Investors are very important early on, users a bit later. Your first collaterals (decks, a web site) are probably directed at investors.

This post was sparked by overhearing two conversations: one about whether picking a cartoon character as a company name would hurt appeal to investors, and one where a company named itself after an industry it explicitly claimed not be in.

A PowerPoint post today, why not… Someone showed me a little trick to remove a point in a line graph. Useful when you have one year with missing data, and simply interpolating the value between the 2 neighbors would be bending the truth. Putting a zero leaves an odd line (see below).

If you select the data point, (not the data series), and go into format data point and the paint bucket, you can set the line to “no line” (see below).

Repeat the process for the neighbor to the right (see below).

As a result, some weird things are happening to the data series labels though. Also, this standard PowerPont/Excel chart is far from presentable in your slide deck. An alternative approach in SlideMagic? Put in a column chart with a zero column value.

I have been playing around with ChatGPT, here is what it suggest to do to make a presentation more interesting:

Here are some tips for making your presentation more interesting:

1. Use visuals, such as images, graphs, and videos, to supplement your presentation and make it more engaging. Visuals can help to illustrate your points, provide examples, and make the presentation more memorable.
2. Tell stories or use examples to illustrate your points and make the presentation more relatable and engaging. Stories and examples can help to bring your ideas to life and make them more interesting and understandable.
3. Use humor or other emotional appeals to connect with your audience and make the presentation more engaging. Humor and emotional appeals can help to grab the audience’s attention, break the ice, and create a more dynamic and engaging presentation.
4. Engage the audience by asking questions, inviting participation, and encouraging feedback. This can help to make the presentation more interactive and engaging, and can help to create a more dynamic and interactive experience for the audience.
5. Use a variety of presentation techniques, such as changing your tone, pace, and volume, to keep the presentation interesting and dynamic. This can help to keep the audience engaged and prevent them from becoming bored or distracted.

Overall, making your presentation more interesting requires using a variety of techniques and approaches to engage the audience and make the presentation more dynamic and engaging.

Here it is me writing again. Pretty good and useful, albeit a bit impersonal. OpenAI is creating APIs for which I have some interesting ideas how to use them in SlideMagic. Watch this space

If you need to plot the progress of your team in the FIFA World Cup, SlideMagic is there to help you. There are a number of football charts in the library, including a tree where you can add teams in the knock out race to the final (see below).

Simply search for football in the SlideMagic app and the charts will show up (see below).

SlideMagic Pro users can convert these slides to PowerPoint or PDF. Free student plan available

Scientists seem to agree that humans are not really able to multi-task. Checking your phone messages while driving, or replying to every email the second they pop up is not very healthy.

This got me thinking. The stereo types are as follows: the extravert manager proudly claims that the above rule is incorrect, she can easily maintain dozens of email, phone, and live conversations in parallel. The introvert coder thinks the above is absolutely true, the buzzing of the microwave in the background kills her concentration.

I think the manager is actually not multi-tasking that much, and the coder might do a bit of it. If you are a manager, your task is to juggle lots of people and keep everything moving. I would consider this as one task.

If you are coding, you might find yourself rewriting 10 different modules, updating a database, fixing the front end, all in one, all components are open in the editor and the system won’t work unless you fixed all of them. That’s a bit more than one task.

So, I think it all depends on what you all a task.

There are 3 roles that video can play in a presentation

1. Recording. This video does not add anything to the presentation, it is simply a narrative of what you want to say. Especially useful when you are not there to present slides. Example: a TED talk video.
2. Decoration. Spectacular visual and sound effects (try to) enhance something that can also be expressed using “regular” slides. Example: an expensive introduction commercial of a new iPhone.
3. Explanation. The video does a better job at explaining something than a regular slide. Example: an animation of how a vaccine impacts a virus.

Think about these when the question “do we need a video” comes up.

When using images from Google Maps, pay attention to the direction of the sun light and shadows the moment the picture was taken. Only 1 of the four possible orientations is the right one, and this is by no way the default north up. Example below. These are 2 pictures of the same are, and you can clearly see that one just does not feel right.

When looking for images, pay attention to how they can lead the eye of the audience. Below are 2 examples of images that draw the eye to a certain spot. (RSS email readers might have to open the link to the blog post to see the images).

I have added the images to the SlideMagic slide library so you can use them in your own presentations. (Search for example for “direction” and they will show up, see the example image below).

Pro users can convert these slides to PowerPoint or PDF

My daughter’s school concert was disrupted by a small toddler in the audience that ran out of patience and starting screaming. The chorus teacher decided to press on while the embarrassed parents tried to leave the audience with the kid (who got even more upset). The whole operation took 2 minutes out of a 4 minutes performance

I would have paused the concert for two minutes and continue with a relaxed audience. Presentation interruptions happen…

After the meeting you promised to send the slides of your presentation in an email. But the deck you used, was the short one, and you have a better/longer one sitting on the shelf. It does have a different structure and graphical look and feel though. Should you send it instead?

Probably not. The slides you send are a quick reminder of the meeting, a permission to email the meeting attendees with your follow up question. Very few people might actually look at the slides in detail. And if they do, each slide is a visual placeholder for the story you told in the meeting. Sending a completely different deck might confuse them.

If you want to send the other presentation, do so in addition, and clearly mark it as something different from what they have seen.

More pro tips for follow up decks:

• If slides contained semi-confidential information that was OK to show for 5 seconds, you can take them out in this version to prevent people from studying things in detail (financials, roadmaps, etc.)
• Always send things in PDF, not the source file (PowerPoint .pptx, or SlideMagic .magic)
• If you are using SlideMagic, consider expanding the explanation panels on each slide, and write the summary of the messages of the slide in a few paragraphs, handy for people to understand a page better when you are not there in the room to explain things verbally.