SlideMagic Blog

Many people are asking me for beta invites for my PowerPoint killer presentation design app. Here is where things stand at the moment. A handful people have been testing the app so far which provided feedback on a few glitches to iron out. The core engine (the concept behind the app) works great (big sigh of relief), there are now some things about workflow flow that needs fixing, so that you can move around faster in the app. Rather than widening the user base who will give me the same feedback, I will fix the obvious issues first.

A self-funded side project, patience please…

If you are are a company shareholder, it is reassuring to see the shareholdings on the first or second page of the company presentation.

For everyone else, the shareholdings can go somewhere in the back.

When you get a question during your presentation, should you abandon your story flow and answer it? It depends.

• For very large audiences, no. One person’s question does not merit throwing out your carefully crafted story line and potentially confuse the rest of the audience. Answer the question very briefly (“Good point, we use super glue for that, I will get back to it later in more detail”) and move on.
• For smaller audiences that have seen the material you are presenting before, probably yes. For example a presentation to the partner group of a venture capital firm.
• In one on one meetings: definitely yes. These meetings are not presentations, they are conversations and you should adjust the story flow based on questions, interruptions of the other person. If there are none, then follow the script, but that is likely going to be a boring meeting.

Searching Product Hunt for keyword “presentation” gives a treasure full of presentation startup ideas.

The web is full of freelance presentation designers and full of sample portfolios. How to get a true feel for the style/skills of a designer: go beyond pages 1, 2, or 3, and look at a page somewhere in the middle of the deck. What does the designer do when no one is looking?

Jokes can be great ice breakers in presentations. Jokes can also be incredibly awkward when introduced in the wrong meeting, at the wrong time, with an audience who is not ready for them.

Here is my advice: do not hardwire risky jokes into your slides, but rather, keep the option to tell them verbally. If the mood is right, go for it, if the audience vibe is not right, you can bail out at the very last moment.

Borat bathing suit slides cannot be unseen, even when double clicked really quickly…

Here is a checklist of basic PowerPoint design skills. If you master these, you are all set to designing great business presentations:

• Program your company colours in the theme
• Set default shapes and lines to fit your company colours
• Delete all slides in a template master until you have just the title page and an empty page left
• Know how to add text to boxes
• Know how to make compositions of text boxes (including aligning and distributing them)
• Know how to crop images (instead of stretching them)
• Know how to make basic bar and column charts in your company colours

No need to learn anything more…

Facebook is a poor alternative to RSS. Because I am not buying ads, blog posts on the I**dea Transplant page** reach around 2% of likers. Twitter, RSS, email, are better ways to stay up to date.

…when I put up this slide [that says something else…]

Solution: change that old slide to have it say what you want it to say!

Last week, I sat in the same seat many of my clients sit in: the one facing a VC. I had a couple of meetings in the valley to test initial appetite for my “PowerPoint killer” web app.

The body language in these meetings was very interesting. In all these meetings you could clearly see when people where excited, agree with you, do not agree with you, listen to you, are not listening to you because they are thinking about something else (probably the next question), already got what you want to say.

Read the signals and use them to steer the conversation in your meeting. But this might be hard to do in real time. The big use of this feedback will be your next VC meeting.