SlideMagic Blog

For subscribers who are using SlideMagic to download PowerPoint templates only: I have re-run the conversions of the entire database to solve some issues with arrows not being rendered correctly. All should be working fine now, let me know if you still find a slide that does not download correctly.

Pro-tip: try the SlideMagic app, a much more convenient way to work with the template database, convert to PowerPoint (if needed) as the very last step in your workflow.

Below a screenshot from an Economist instagram post:

The labels of the first 2 bars have been placed over the bars themselves to save space: there is now more room for the bars themselves. Other labels to the right of the bars.

I am not a fan:

• The white over red of the top labels is hard to read
• There is no nice and simple list of the top players, aligned in a consistent way
• The names inside the chart area makes it harder to relate the bar to the axis
• (I also prefer to put data labels in the chart rather than having a very imprecise value axis)

Here is a quick illustration of a bar chart in SlideMagic (The Eonomist did not provide the exact values, hence the dummy data).

Many people are surprised that SlideMagic is a desktop app. “Hey, it is 2020, not 1995?” Well, the SlideMagic desktop app is a bit different than the things you would run on your machine in 1995. It updates frequently (sometimes daily), and constantly is in touch with the slide data base server. I would actually call it a “dedicated browser”: a front end for the SlideMagic server with features such as dropdown menus and drag/drop between multiple windows that you cannot find in a regular browser.

People agree that on phones and tables, a dedicated app gives a better experience than a web page. The same is (still) true on a desktop.

Photo by Ilse Orsel on Unsplash

White space is a good thing in design. It makes text breathe, the whole page looks calmer somehow.

This applies to business presentations as well. Cut text that is not required, make images as big as possible, and your slide starts to look like a well-designed ad on a billboard.

However, in some cases, a business presentation slide is not meant to be a fashion ad. Think of the sales target data for the next quarter, or the new IT system architecture that you need to get approved. What I often see in SlideMagic is a “left over battlefield” with the final product of a complex table or system diagram. After many iterations it finally looks like it should look and everyone agrees to it.

In the process, the designer forgot to clean up, and remove rows and columns that are no longer needed. In SlideMagic, you can get rid of them with a few clicks and your entire diagram or table will scale up instantly, in the right proportions.

Yes, you gave up some white space around the edges, but overall the chart is more practical. To make things calmer, consider cleaning up data and text in the cells of your diagram instead.

Unlike in the case of a printed book, digital documents are never finished or final (despite being called “final version v3 - final”). Instead they have “committed versions” like programmers use when working with git to manage iterations of code. For most presentations these committed versions are documents you deemed good enough to share with someone at some stage in the project. That’s why the email sent box is becoming the new file archiving system. (Where is that document I sent out last week?). Sent it, or it did not happen.

Photo by Ben Wicks on Unsplash

A slide came flying by on Twitter:

I might a quick remake of this slide in SlideMagic, in line with the SlideMagic philosophy: quick, clear, nothing too fancy (= time consuming) and added it to the SlideMagic template database since it could be a useful basis for any slide that needs to show some sort of chain of events.

What did I change?

• Removed the low-contrast red on black colours
• Took out the simplistic icons and replaced it with no-nonsense clear numbers
• Rounded up numbers so to avoid cut up people (audience is not hard core scientists)
• Put in a proper bar chart to show the magnitude of 416 vs 3, instead of an icon count
• Flipped the design left to right to make the flow in time more clear

This slide demonstrates how easy it is to line up bars of a data chart, arrows, and text cells of a table in the overall slide layout (an absolute pain on other presentation design software).

Yesterday’s “plumbing” post triggered me to show you an example of how you would quickly put a slide together to update the management team of your company when you are doing some plumbing. The work flow sequence below took less than a minute:

An update.

A couple of days ago I released version 2.5 of SlideMagic with lots and lots of small updates that were sitting on the todo list. When designing, I cannot stand it when a small detail is off, and the same applies to software development. And like in design, most users/viewers won’t notice these individual details, but when taken together they add up to something. This slide does looks right for some reason, this app just works for some reason. Opening up SlideMagic should trigger an update to version 2.5.3 (writing this on November 11) after a few minutes, if not, you can visit the SlideMagic download site to install the latest version.

I am making changes to the positioning as well. That download or app landing page is now the home page of SlideMagic and no longer the web site that says that SlideMagic is a template bank, but also an app, and also a place where you can download entire presentations. All confusing, and still a left over of the SlideMagic template store on Shopify. The Shopify store is closed, and (that was quite a moment), the entire V1 version of the SlideMagic web app has been wiped from the server.

So the web site (still WIP) now reflects what SlideMagic is: presentation software with a uniquely clever user interface and a huge built-in template data base.

Photo by Bruce Warrington on Unsplash

In between the election news: waterfall charts….

Waterfall charts are a great tool to explain the difference between 2 scenarios. In SlideMagic, they are really easy to create. Below is one I put together quickly with data from Apple’s 2020 Q4 earnings result, and a photo I found using SlideMagic’s built-in Unsplash image search. Notice how I opted for an unusual vertical waterfall, to create more space for the axis labels.

Some people would argue that you could make the chart even clearer by breaking the axes: showing them as ‘5.6’ and ‘4.7’ for example. Yes, it would highlight the deltas better, but in general, I think manipulating axes, well, manipulates the message. The fact that the changes are relatively small to the total is part of the message.

I reshuffled the rows a bit to group the decreases and increases. That makes it more clear in one sense, but less clear in another. Your choice.

\How do you go about making such an analysis? I put my numbers in a Google Sheet that you can view yourself.

1. Enter the data for the 2 comparable quarters in 2 columns. Add the totals as calculations rather than hard-coded numbers to check that you did not make any typos. (The blue cells are the one that I type in, the white ones are calculations).
2. Create space between the 2 columns
3. Pull numbers from the input that you consider drivers. You see that I deviated a bit from the way the input was presented:

This tweet about a habit of conference organisers:

It does not make sense. Nobody prepares slides that long before a presentation, nobody reviews presentations 1 month in advance, and the request is probably not credible.

Why do conference organisers try?

• To spot potential content disasters early
• To spot potential time over-runs early
• To spot potential layout disasters early (bullet points…)
• To spot potential technical issues early (‘What, no Apple Keynote?”)

These are valid concerns and the solutions is possible somewhere in between.

• Rather than sending a broadcast request, do some research about your speakers, leaving the pros, and focus on possible weak links with coaching (and hassle)
• Ask for a draft of a “typical presentation” way in advance to get some sense of what is coming
• Set a very credible deadline 2-3 days for the event (“we are building the conference hard drive”)

And, if you are a speaker and do not have a story on the shelf (it is the story that matters, not the slides), it is probably a good idea to start getting your head around what you want to say a few weeks in advance. Slides can be made in a couple of hours (try using SlideMagic, it is really easy), crafting a compelling story takes a lot longer. Starting to think about it early means that your brain worries about it, even when you are not actively aware of it and things will fall in place later.

Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash