SlideMagic Blog

I changed the font that SlideMagic uses for PowerPoint conversions from Calibri to Arial as of version 2.6.22.

The thought behind Calibri was that when converting slides to PowerPoint, I wanted to stick as close as possible to the box-standard Microsoft format as possible, and Calibri is the standard font for Microsoft Office applications. SlideMagic users “complained” that the PowerPoint conversions did not look very similar to the beautiful originals. So I made the change.

Helvetica (especially thin variants) looks more elegant but gives compatibility issues on Windows machines. Hence Arial it is….

Obviously when you convert your SlideMagic .magic files to PDF, you get the exact same look & feel as in the SlideMagic app. This is the workflow we should aim for. SlideMagic .magic files are the source code of your documents, PDF is how you share the result with external audiences.

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UPDATE: THE MICROSOFT OFFICE PLUGIN HAS BEEN DISCONTINUED (30 JUNE 2026)

Microsoft made some updates to its Office API (and SlideMagic made some changes to its server), and as a result, the SlideMagic PowerPoint add-in starts working a lot better.

The SlideMagic PowerPoint add-in is especially useful for users who download PowerPoint templates from the SlideMagic web site. Most of you are people who were subscribers to the legacy template store (RIP). Since PowerPoint conversions are a pro feature of SlideMagic, the add-in is only useful for pro subscribers.

What has changed?

• The add-in now remembers your login details across PowerPoint files No need to constantly log in (again).
• More importantly (thank you Microsoft), the SlideMagic add-in now adds slides straight into your existing PowerPoint presentation

The add-in is still an alpha phase, and things are tested for the moment in the online PowerPoint environment. I will submit it for another go for Microsoft approval to get it working with PowerPoint desktop versions as well.

Here is how to install the add-in:

1. Download the file slidemagic.xml from this link
2. Log in to your online Microsoft 365 account, click PowerPoint, and open a new presentation
3. Select “insert”, then “add-ins”
4. Select “my add-ins”, then “upload my add -in” in the top of the window (it is not available in the Microsoft store yet)
5. Select the slidemagic.xml file you just download and upload it
6. Go back to the '“home” ribbon

The add-in is installed. To use it:

This tweet sums up SlideMagic’s strategy at the moment:

Ten happy users who use the product for hours every day and pay for it. Presentations is a very tricky segment, and existing solutions (including those with lots and lots of installs) suffer from one of these problems:

• Users don’t think making presentations with it is fun
• Users don’t use it as their go-to presentation platform
• Users don’t see the value to pay for it

The strategy of buying millions of users and then waiting for 0.5% who might end up as a user is expensive, risky, and probably leads to the wrong product.

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Since v2.6.18, SlideMagic has in-app onboarding tutorials. Click the ‘?’ icon in the bottom left of the app, and you will be taken around the features of the screen that is currently active. The slide edit screen also covers the general navigation inside the app. Next to the edit screen, there are page walkthroughs for the story, settings, presenter, image/icon search, and template search screens.

There is still some formatting to do, and the tutorial needs a more prominent position when you start SlideMagic for the very first time, but all in all, very useful I think. The real-time examples work much better than static tutorial pages, and now, the tutorial will always be up to date with the user interface (which is still changing now and then).

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These were the dreaded words of your McKinsey project manager when she ripped out your analysis masterpiece from page 10 to page 57 in the document. Then, as a junior analyst, I felt depressed as I interpreted this that my work has been for nothing.

Here are some things that project manager could have said in addition:

• Most of the time, slides that communicate the answer are completely different from slides that show how you got to the answer.
• Related: the project is moving on now, we have convinced the client that our assumptions are correct, now we need to get them to move and take action
• Without that slide that sits now on page 57, we would never have gotten where we are now. If we still had to talk about that analysis on page 10, we probably were doing something wrong

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Over the weekend I re-wrote the entire analytics engine of SlideMagic. (Apologies for the frequent app updates).

I had a whole bunch of tools installed, some of them dating bask a long time when I just started out with the blog. They were spitting out a lot of data that was never really used. Web analytics brings back memories of my time as a McKinsey consultant. The client having a massive and sophisticated business intelligence (“BI”) information system that could produce any breakdown of any segment at any time. Our work was to find what actually mattered, which often was a surprisingly simple chart.

If you are running a massive web site with billions of hits, then A/B testing the colour of buttons might make you money. You hire the web analytics consultant, let her do her work, and in the end your return on investment is a 0.005% uptake in conversion on a billion of clicks minus the cost of the data analysis project. The result is a massive amount of trackers that follow you across the internet.

SlideMagic no longer has them. I went back to basics, and put a very simple system in place, that gives me the information I need given the growth stage SlideMagic is in (making sure that the product works flawlessly). In the process I could also eliminate any possible information that could, if you really wanted to, identify a user. All is clean now, and I understand/control 100% what is actually going on with your data.

The question is raised in this tweet:

My perspective:

• As a point estimate, they are probably not useful. Forecasting something that does not exist yet is hard, and ‘TAM’ is not interpreted in a consistent way like ‘next year’s revenue’ is.
• But as a framework to think about things, it could be useful. Forget about the exact definition of TAM. Instead help yourself and a potential investor think about one more approach to think about the potential of your business. “What would you have to believe in order to…”

In the SlideMagic app, search for ‘TAM’ and you will find a few templates that can get you started. Another good framework to use are waterfall charts where you can peel off market segment layers. To put your chart in context, you can add some sort of crystal ball image…

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Most financial slides show an absolute number and its percentage growth for things like revenues, gross profit, operating profit, and operating income. But they also show margins: operating profit, gross profit, operating income as a % of sales. If the gross margin grows from 50% to 55%, is that 5% growth, or 10%?

Microsoft did it right in its last earnings presentation: explicitly name increases in margins as ‘points’. So going from 50% to 55% gross margin is a 5 points increase. See the example slide below

Mmm, now that we have a slide here, let’s talk about it. What is good:

• Clean font, clean layout, even without a logo
• Numbers are rounded up

What could improve:

• Use the full space of the slide, the table (probably coming out of Excel) is tilted to the left
• The titles of the table are a bit “heavy” with that blue colour splashed on them. It is better to use an accent colour to highlight a piece of data that is important for your message
• The dark grey font on light grey background looks sophisticated, but hurt the contrast that is important in financial slides

In SlideMagic, I put the following together quickly (in the SlideMagic spirit)

What did I do?

• Use the entire slide
• Accent colour is used for important data
• Light column headings
• Re-shuffled the order of the table items, yes, gross profit and gross margin are related, but I think it works better to group billions and margins
• Add small bar charts to highlight the comparison of the growth numbers

I made the user interface for speaker notes a bit clearer in version 2.6.12 of SlideMagic. The mysterious bullet point icon at the bottom of the slide has been replaced with a simple text link. Click and you will see a big and bold overlay over the slide where you can add your notes.

Speaker notes will show up in the presenter view window when you present the slides and are only visible to you the presenter, not to the audience. On a Zoom call, share the audience window to the video call participants, while you keep an eye on your private presenter view with important reminders of the points you want to make when presenting the slide.

In SlideMagic, you can edit your speaker notes also in this presenter view window. This is not only great for last minute fixes of your story, but also gives you a platform to edit the flow of your story slide by slide. Increase the size of your presenter view window, and click through your presentation. You see a small thumb of your slide, an even smaller one of the next slide up, and a big text box to write down your points.

When you return to the normal view of the slide, you will see that the speaker note edit link has changed colour, to remind you that there are speaker notes in this slide. This is important when you share .magic files with other users, because they will be able to read those speaker notes as well. (This prevents you from sending “Better not share our 50% churn with investors in the first presentation with investors if they do not ask for it….” to well, an investor attending your first presentation)

Some questions on Quora seem to be a setup for people with a solution to answer them. SlideMagic is not in the business of selling slide templates, still, I could not resist answering:

I think it is the wrong question to ask first. You should start with “What is my business model?”

A business model can have an endless number of options, no one is the same, hence it is hard to fit into a standard template. Even worse, trying to fit your business model into a PowerPoint template that actually does not fit gets your audience confused of what your business model actually is.

Once you have decided on your business model, you can find a suitable template, and it can be very simple and straightforward. For example, if you charge a set up fee, and an hourly rate, that is a table with 4 boxes… Clean simple, unambiguous.

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