SlideMagic Blog

Quantitative market research companies come back with pages and pages and pages of data in PowerPoint. It is tempting to cut and paste to “add the survey results in the presentation”. Not so fast, let’s clean things up first.

1. Find out what the research actually says. This is the most important step. There is meaning in 2 levels. Level 1 is to discover what trends the data displays (not always obvious from a randomly generated bar chart or a dense table of numbers). Then level 2: is this an important insight? A segmentation or cut is not always meaningful, sometimes data points do not actually vary that much. Sometimes conclusions are obvious / not surprising, not interesting.
2. Ask for access to the original research data in a spreadsheet to find patterns, trends that have not been put in the final report of the research company
3. Clean up the graphs you want to use (or even better, create them from scratch with just the data you need):
   1. Move non-essential statistical lingo/jargon/details in small print to the foot note: n values, standard deviations, etc. etc. are not worth the screen real estate in a stand up presentation. The person who wants to read them, will find them in the foot note. (Exception: certain scientific disciplines where one statistical value is all that matters, in that case make a very prominent chart with just that value.)
   2. Cut non-essential filler words from the data series labels, think as if you were writing headlines for a newspaper article or blog post. Simplify questions that were asked to respondents, put the original questions in the footnote or in an appendix chart.
   3. Re-sort data series to match the point you want to make.
   4. Take out tick marks, make bars/columns fatter, take out Excel labels and titles, and insert your own in PowerPoint/Keynote, round numbers, fix chart colours to match your corporate colour scheme
   5. Where necessary, add circles or arrows to highlight the point you want to make. Adjust the colours to emphasise your points (apply accent colours correctly)

A decade ago, a company’s look & feel could be tightly controlled by the corporate communications department, with tight brand guidelines and consistently executed print advertising.

Today that design capability is fragmenting: PowerPoint presentations, product PDFs, web pages, mobile apps. Design is everywhere. Especially in large corporates that span multiple countries/continents it becomes hard to find what the corporate language actually is.

When in doubt, I revert to the corporate web page to get inspiration for a PowerPoint design.

Art: Gerard van Honthorst, The Concert, 1623

Some of you out there are probably still afraid of using a new presentation design tool that is still in beta for live presentations. Here is another way to get started: use SlideMagic as your sketch board.

Many of you use bullet points to sketch out the content of a presentation. Maybe in a word processor, maybe in PowerPoint. The problem is that once you have iterated those bullets and everyone agrees to them, it is hard to turn those lists into visual designs.

Here is where SlideMagic could come in handy. It is very easy to set up charts that are not lists: a quick table, a quick contrast between two options, a quick 2x2. Jot your ideas down, and if you set your accent colour and logo, the whole sketch board will probably look better than a finished end product in PowerPoint.

Use SlideMagic to form your first ideas of your presentation, until the moment has arrived when you “have to” translate the designs to PowerPoint or Keynote. You can of course, but I think many of you will find that it is much easier to stick to SlideMagic after trying a few pages.

Art: an unfinished painting by William Berryman, created between 1808 and 1816

The more I work with SlideMagic, the more I realise that it is not really a presentation design tool in itself, it is a tool that supports a philosophy how people in corporations should communicate with slides. Ultimately, I might write all this down in a more organised way, but hey, why not use this blog post to throw out my ideas.

• Soul. Presenters should be given the stage to be themselves, be convincing, use human language.
• Efficiency. The big objective is to cut the amount of time that is wasted on presentations / corporate communication:
  • Time to prepare slides.
  • Time to deliver a presentation
  • Time to understand what the presenter actually wants to say
• Aesthetics. Ugliness pollutes the work environment: cheap, disorganised, second tier. Every corporate communication needs to look decent.

How do we get there, and how does SlideMagic help?

• A small, simple set of presentation “Lego” bricks, a visual language with very few words. It is similar to English. “Business English” that 2 non-native English speakers use to communicate actually requires a very small vocabulary.
  • They are easy to learn. Most people do not get past the level of bullet points in PowerPoint/Keynote because they don’t want to, they do not have to courage to venture into the advanced features of the software. SlideMagic is simple enough to learn that people can push themselves and go beyond the bullet points
  • It removes a source of writers’ block: no procrastination and thinking what advanced slide layout to create. In business, you actually only need a few concepts to express your ideas and SlideMagic enables you to create them. (A list, a table of pros/cons, a contrast, a progression in time, etc.)
  • Uniform layout: it always looks good, the audience know where to look for what, the designer knows where to put stuff. Uniformity is not boring, it is useful in business communication
• A disconnect from software that is used to write reports, slide documents, and spreadsheets. At first, this might look like a disadvantage: not being able to copy past your spreadsheet across. But, starting from that clean sheet of paper makes you focus on creating a slide that says what you want it to say, not a slide that shows page 53 of your analysis.
• Elimination of typography/design freedom to set margins, padding, title positions, etc. It is too hard to get it right, and too easy to get it wrong for the layman designer

I sometimes help out clients to clean up a very large presentation. Incorrect PowerPoint use, copying and pasting of different slide masters, and a less trained eye for design/proportions create slide decks that look inconsistent and “not right”.

I created the presentation design app SlideMagic in such a way, that these mistakes are hard to make. Here is the list of actions I typically go through when cleaning up big PowerPoint files. (And this is also the list of PowerPoint annoyances [well, most of them] you do not have to worry about anymore when using SlideMagic).

• Locate the client’s super clean template file and use it as a start for the presentation
• Go in the slide master view and delete all master slides you do not need (I am usually just left with a title page and a regular slide)
• Create slide templates with the correct title positioning for 1) empty page, 2) picture in frame page, full page picture page, and separator slide
• Create drawing guides (left, right, top, bottom, not centre and middle)
• Set the the default text boxes, shapes, and lines (font, colours)
• Copy the monster presentation into this new master file
• Select all slides in the presentation and apply the standard template slide (title, not text) to it.
• Font replace all the incorrect fonts to the right font with one command
• For each slide:
  • Adjust the title text, so it fits in its frame, 2 lines maximum
  • Resize shapes that should have the same height and width
  • Make sure squares and circles have a 1:1 aspect ratio
  • Reset the aspect ratio of distorted images (if possible), otherwise do it by eye
  • Re-crop images
  • Increase/decrease font sizes, adjust text if necessary
  • Tone down the colours, make sure that things that need an accent colour, have one
  • Make sure everything fits in the slide frame
  • Realign and distribute the whole slide, centre/mid-align objects that need it
  • Take out gradients
  • Take out drop shadows
  • Take out outline lines around boxes/shapes
  • Round up numbers
  • Make sure numbers line up correctly vertically
  • Apply correct colours to data charts
  • Reformat tables (colours, text alignment, uniform row heights, column widths, font sizes, make sure they fit in the slide frame)

This is the hardest thing in presentation design. Many people fill up a slide with far too much detail. But others write such high level, abstract concepts, that the slide says nothing at all. What is the best middle ground?

Let’s declutter a busy slide. This is a mental exercise I usually go through

1. Cut out/cut through buzzwords and filler words
2. Cut out side tangents
3. See how many points the slide wants to make. If it is just a sequential listing of independent story elements (i.e., the slide does not want to convey a relationship between them), we can them spread them out: each slide gets one point.
4. If the elements have some sort of relationship in them, it is usually one of 2 kinds: a contrast, or a ranking of pro/cons of different options, or a cause/effect story of multiple factors influencing each other leading to a conclusion
5. I try to draw the pro/con table or process flow diagram on a piece of paper so I understand what is actually going on. I draw multiple versions where I simplify things (combine rows/columns, swap rows/columns, boxes, arrows) until I get to a clean version of the message
6. Now I go in slide design mode:
   1. First slide is a generic one: “our solution is better because we managed to paint the object blue instead of yellow. Yes it might not sound like it, but this is a big deal, let me explain why”
   2. This is followed by a number of slides where I explain key sub points in more detail
   3. Now that I have warmed up the audience, I can show a stylised version of my paper napkin that brings the whole thing together.

Who would have thought that I would still keep things up seven years later when I started out with this post. We went from Slides that Stick, to Sticky Slides, to Idea Transplant, and now to SlideMagic.

Many people ask me, how do you do this? Well, here is the secret: don’t make it a big effort. Everyday, I usually take something from my client work, strip out the confidential parts, anonymise and share it with you. Not more than 10 minutes of work.

Hopefully this can inspire more of you to open up to the world.

In some industry sectors, especially financial services, people still insist on printing the presentation slides and handing out booklets at the start of the meeting. You can have groups of 10-20 people sitting around a conference table flicking through pages.

It is great for taking notes, analysing detailed financials, but it is not that great for a close connection between speaker and audience, and that last minute typo in the name of the CEO cannot be corrected once on paper.

Sometimes you have to pick your battles and if print is the way to go, think about these issues when starting the design of your slides. The bottom line, get a slide to look good on paper on day 1 of the design project, not at 3AM the night before the meeting.

• Colours appear different on screen than on paper, especially on cheaper, older, or almost-out-of-toner printers. Bright blue can turn into faded grey, lively orange can become girly pink, subtle grey shadings turn into bright white, just to name a few potential problems.
• Hole punchers for binding machines require extra space at the top of your page, test it.
• Dark back grounds empty toner cartridges and make make the fingers of your audience black.
• You can get away with low res images on a 15 year old VGA overhead projector, on paper though, you will get caught. Use high resolution images.
• A monitor frame, or the light rectangle on a projection screen provide an implicit frame for your slide. Paper should do the same in theory, but A4/letter/4:3 and other issues makes it highly unpredictable how your slides are scaled on paper. In the worst case you might have draw a tiny grey line around your slides to anchor things (yes really).

I have been working with the PowerPoint 2016 preview for a while now, and overall my feedback is very positive (see my PowerPoint 2016 review here).

There is one small thing that keeps me going back to PowerPoint 2011 though: the ability to customise the toolbar at the top of the screen. My set up has not really changed since this blog post from 2008. When working in PowerPoint I constantly need to access buttons that align/distribute/crop/flip and send objects to the back (and the drop shadow button to kill drop shadows). With my custom toolbar, I basically circumvented the majority of the PowerPoint user interface and created my own.

Hopefully Microsoft will include this feature in the final release of PowerPoint 2016.

Image credit: Kate on Flickr

The logical flow for the presenter:

1. These are my principles
2. This is what I made based on them

The logical flow for the audience:

1. What did she make?
2. Why did she make it that way?

Don’t sound like a professor who never gets to the point, even if you are a professor.

Art: A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery, is a painting by Joseph Wright of Derby