SlideMagic Blog

If you want, you can try out the SlideMagic plugin for PowerPoint. When installed, it opens a task pane on the rights side of your PowerPoint screen, you can log into SlideMagic, search for templates, which when downloaded appear in a new PowerPoint presentation. With a copy-paste or drag, you can add them to your presentation.

I am currently in the process of getting SlideMagic Ltd. approved as a Microsoft Partner to add it to the official Office app store. Microsoft is experiencing some capacity issues at the moment as the working-from-home-world is overloading its cloud servers.

To beta test the add-in in the mean time, you can do the following. This is a slightly advanced process, sorry.

• Download the slidemagic.xml file here
• On Mac follow these instructions (original on the Microsoft site). Copy the .xml file in this folder: /Users//Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Powerpoint/Data/Documents/wef (if you cannot see the Library folder in your Finder, select the ‘go’ dropdown in the Finder, then press the OPTION key and it should appear. Restart PowerPoint and a new icon “Start SlideMagic” should appear.
• On Windows, the process looks a bit more tricky: see here.
• The easiest is actually the online version of Office (instructions). Open PowerPoint in your browser, select Insert, select Add-ins, click manage my Add-ins, then upload my Add-in to upload the slidemagic.xml file.

This is all still work in progress.

Everything gets thrown around at the moment. Everything is all of a sudden allowed. Laundry, pets, and kids in the background of video calls., no problem. Why not take the opportunity to change the way you present as well?

Sorry, I did not have a lot of time to prepare that 100-pager, but these 10 pages capture exactly what we should discuss today

And while you are at it, why not use SlideMagic as an alternative to PowerPoint now that everything is risk free? Hey, maybe some of the new habits will stick.

A follow up on yesterday’s post: the basic mechanism of the PowerPoint plug in works. I can side load the app in a task panel, let users log in, you can search for templates, to add a slide to your presentation I can only open it as a new presentation with 1 slide at the moment, you have to copy the slide across to your own file.

It is fascinating to see all the stages this slide goes through (automated mostly):

• I design the slide in the SlideMagic app
• Upload them to the template server
• The server converts them to PowerPoint and create screenshots
• The server updates the tags
• PowerPoint connects to the server and loads the side panel
• User logs in, and searches
• PowerPoint loads the PPTX file from the SlideMagic server

As soon as you download the SlideMagic slides into PowerPoint you instantly see the strength of SlideMagic when it comes to adjusting templates. Try adding a row to the SWOT diagram, it is hard.

I am not expecting to unseat PowerPoint’s install base any time soon, and the optimal situation would be where both applications can work together nicely. A robust plug in can help users who are hesitant to make the full switch to SlideMagic (and included in these users are people that work for companies that have very tough security policies to run software from new vendors on corporate machines.)

The next step is to make the plugin robust and get it distributed properly in the Office app store. Work in progress

I am continuing to experiment with how people access the slides of SlideMagic. Currently I am building a side panel plug in for PowerPoint, where subscribers can log in and paste slides directly into a PowerPoint presentation.

Now that I have mastered both front end and back end development, the search mechanism and user interface is easy to create. The tricky bit will be the final step, when it comes to adding a downloaded slide into an existing presentation. Microsoft does not give PowerPoint a high priority when it comes to the Office Javascript API. Let’s see how it goes.

Over the past few days I have ironed out a lot of small issues with the template search engine. Most of them were behind the scenes, how I can classify, tag, and group slides in a world of duplicates, typos, plurals, and related keywords. I think things are really starting to work now. Now it is just a matter of continuing to add templates that are useful (i.e., not diluting search results for the sake of template volume). I am aiming for a Google-type improvement: the front page won’t change much, the usefulness of the search results will get better and better over time.

PS. That Unsplash image on the cover is really nice, I quickly added a template based on it on the template store, you can find it here.

Photo by Steven Lelham on Unsplash

The current flood of data about Corona cases and fatalities shows once more how graphs and other slides are not very effective in changing behaviour: everyone is happily going outside infecting each other. Too much information, too abstract (20% exponential growth, so what?), and looking backwards rather than into the future.

I think governments should publish a daily updated forecast number for the number of cumulative fatalities 4-8 weeks from now, and adjust that number based on daily developments. To make it more tangible, you could pro-rata that number down to the 50 to 150 circle of friends and family most people have. One simple, tangible number that gets updated everyday at 18:00 based on how we are doing as a group together.

Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash

We got the house settled into some routine now which means I can focus my attention on SlideMagic again. Following up on a blog post of 2 days ago, I made more improvements to the slide search algorithm that produces related slides:

• It identifies variants of the same design (more or fewer columns or rows for example
• A similar message or concept that they are trying to convey
• Slides that are different but have the same visual structure as the one you initially picked

I removed the category labels in the search results (that were useful for me, but not really for a user). Instead, I am going for a single list of slides sorted by relevance without revealing what is behind that relevance. And that algorithm will get better and more accurate over time.

A key step in my slide design process is figuring out what sort of grid I need: 3 x 1, 1 x 5, 4 x 4? Almost every slide in a business presentation is some sort of table in disguise. Today I started adding a “more x by y” search suggestions on the web-based template browser of SlideMagic. I will add more automation to slide classification in the near future. One obvious extension is the same slide but then with 1 more column, etc.

The number of app installs of SlideMagic 2.0 is still small, but the graph has a similar shape as the exponential graphs we all have gotten used to over the past weeks.

Modern analytics tools allow you to track literally everything under the sun in your app and/or web site. Instant information overload supported by colourful graphs that look good, but don’t say much. This overload of data is similar to the ones I would encounter as a consultant at McKinsey. And now, 15+ years later, I find myself following a similar approach to making sense of it for my own app.

Most case examples about analytics are built for established apps and web sites with huge customer flows you can micro analyse whether the check out button should br green or red. SlideMagic is not there yet.

• I find myself going through a certain cycle. It starts with a basic question, “how many people did actually install the app”, which results in a daily manual routine to find the latest number, which then gets translated into a proper query in an analytics app. I check whether my analytics tool is consistent with the numbers I can dig out of my own server. Slowly, slowly, I get a sense of how the app behaves with a consistent set of data that I can recognise.
• Slowly, slowly, I start adding more questions to the picture, and make sure that I keep a picture of how they relate.
• Each factor has a specific visualisation: some are lines, some are bars, some uniques, some totals, some cumulative, you need to play around with it.

Everyone is working remotely The meeting is on an improvised video call. Less time to prepare the slide deck. People watching slides on small screens. There is less room for “escape behaviour”, request another sensitivity analysis, rephrase slide 25 to get back to it later.

The current situation might be a turning point in corporate communication. PowerPoint still holds the fact packs and the result of our analysis, built up over months, updated with the latest information. Then, there is the (virtual) meeting tomorrow where you have 5 minutes to make a point. “OK, what it all boils down to is this…”

And that’s where SlideMagic comes in: fast and simple.

Photo by Tommy Lisbin on Unsplash