SlideMagic Blog

Modern presentation software today is much more than a slide design tool:

Presentation files are the main documents for decision making, most PowerPoint presentations were never intended as background visuals for stand up presentations to large audiences.

Most of the time, it is not about finished, final slides, but jotting down rough ideas, organising work and splitting it up amongst the members of a team, defining what the work is what needs to be done and what sort of analysis is required.

It is not all about slides, analysis is equally important:: manipulating data, graphs, and complex diagrams, to extract insights, understand systems, and sort of planning and sequencing of activities.

Office software plays a key role in converting and fitting the same document to different screens, devices, and file formats.

Today’s presentation is important, but presentation software is probably the main filing system used in corporate world at the moment, often linked to the email inbox (“what was that version I sent 2 weeks ago?”)

You can edit and design slides yourself, but you also need to manage collaboration with others: the technical issues of getting and integrating comments, and the management of the decision making process of what goes in, and what does not.

Presentation design software can be used to jot down bullet points like a word processor, or play the role of the platform to stage sophisticated designs and animations that professional designers use.

It is impossible to create a piece of software that can be excellent in all these areas. Some of them require specialised software development skills and understanding of user needs. Some of them contradict.

Rabobank CEO Wiebe Draijer replied in an interview in NRC Handelsblad to comments made in an article by a columnist targeting the use of corporate jargon in Dutch companies.

The journalist view:

• Jargon creates a distance between senior management and the rest of the organisation
• Jargon creates a distance between the bank and its customers

The CEO view:

• Frequent meetings in English at a Dutch company creates a “language soup” that can come across a bit strange to outsiders
• Certain words have become efficient and convenient shortcuts for a big project, initiative, philosophy, strategy and summarise months of work and discussions in 4 letters.

I think both have a point: efficient meetings full of shortcuts are better long and slow discussions where everyone is looking for the right words. Still, you should watch out when external audiences are involved: especially large gatherings of people and written material that can end up on anyone’s desk (including presentations).

Because of all the social media noise, I think that most of the frequent readers of this blog do so via email updates. When updating my website (the new user license for a desktop app that I am developing), I discovered that subscribe links under each post were pointing to the template store subscription page: “If you like this blog post, please pay me right now”, which does not makes sense. Apologies. I fixed things below. I am still running RSS feeds and email subscriptions on Feedburner, since 2008…

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As a kid (I must have been 13-14 years old), I actually saw one of my friends getting hit by his own boomerang from behind while he was searching the sky (ahead of him, ignoring 180 degrees of his surroundings) where it had gone. In addition, he ignored our warnings…

Almost all the time delays in coding are the result of some short cut that I took before and did not bother to fix.

I learned the same the hard way in my early days at McKinsey as an analyst, when I was building spreadsheet models. Just before the presentation, your manager would come and require a quick change in the numbers to reflect a new insight (or complication). In the end, the numbers that count are the ones on the PowerPoint slide, not in your model, so the changes were easily made.

But after the presentation, the adrenaline levels dropped and there was no immediate need to mop up that spreadsheet. Mistake, because by the time the next presentation came along you had no way to get everything consistent again.

So, quick fixes are fine, just clean things up quickly afterwards to be ready for future changes. As an analyst, you control the numbers with your model. If people don’t agree with the outcome, and/or feel it does not makes sense (unfortunately senior people have a good nose for this), something inside the model has to change, to reflect that insight. Simply overriding the output cells will work for one presentation only.

A few years ago when I started thinking about about the SlideMagic project I though it was all about the design. Just find a way for people to make beautiful charts and it will be a big hit.

I am close to completing version 2.0 of the SlideMagic app, and am now in a position I have never been in before: I can design the actual user experience of someone creating slides click by click, being free fom common software design platforms, standards, and practices. And here is the real magic. I make dozens of user interface decisions a day, what colours get copied, what things get highlighted, how font sizes are set, what box is selected after you did an action. Hundreds of small decisions add up to a big experience. You cannot pinpoint why it works, but it does somehow. It is all a matter of incredible attention to detail.

The pitch of SlideMagic is changing. It will all be about the speed at which you can design a pretty decent looking slide.

(Don’t tell this secret to anyone).

Photo by toine Garnier on Unsplash

In the beginning, I see early adaptors of SlideMagic using it as a tool to create slides that are integrated in a regular PowerPoint presentation. Now that a 100% accurate and instant on the stop PowerPoint conversion is integrated in SlideMagic 2.0, this will be no issue. Your colleagues won’t notice your secret (and don’t tell anyone).

This is the the example of the type of slide that is very time consuming to create in PowerPoint:

• Lots of images that need to be cropped, scaled, and positioned in a grid (often logos, or product shots)
• A mix of text, data, and data charts
• Multiple data charts that need to be lined up exactly
• Multiple data charts that need to have the exact comparable scaling

SlideMagic 2.0 can do it in less than a minute and plop the chart straight in your presentation :-). Everything is a fully editable PowerPoint shape, every chart is a regular PowerPoint/Excel object.

And… if your boss wants you to add 2 rows (one between rows 2 and 3, and one at the bottom) 5 minutes before the presentation, you will have 4 minutes left to get yourself a coffee before the meeting starts.

Overheard at a dinner last week: “when you paste one presentation into the other, all the colours and fonts got mixed up, we have to deal with this all the time”.

This happens for 2 reasons:

1. By design: PowerPoint and Keynote offer lots and lots of designer freedom: fonts, colours, layouts, styles. Multiply even a small team x the number of things you can change in a file and there will always be differences.
2. PowerPoint tries to help the user by harmonising formats when Frankensteining decks together. This is actually pretty hard to do and a better user experience would have been to make preserving the original layout the default one. Usually, charts look actually pretty similar, but if 2 users use a different colour code for “blue”, disastrous things happen when your computer is going to try to sort things out for you. (You can control this behaviour in PowerPoint, see this link)

How to deal with it? Have somewhere on the corporate file server a pristine, clean PowerPoint template that will always be the starting point of any presentation. Open this one first, then paste the slides of any other deck inside it (not vice versa), and fix any mistakes you notice. In that way, you prevent the spread of template degradation as each deck is reset to its original colours all the time.

The above is one of the reasons why SlideMagic has stricter template guidelines to have you spend less time in presentation hell at the expense of slightly reduced creative freedom

Over the past 30 years, I did an INSEAD MBA, worked for a decade at McKinsey, and built a global micro brand in presentation design. Why coding, when this is something that 20 year olds do in far away places like Ukraine?

Yes, it is a bit crazy, but I would call it “calculated craziness”:

• The world has changed a lot. It is now possible to build a software product with the only investment involved is the missed income of other things you could have done with your time. Try doing the same thing 20 years ago and think of the investment and effort you need
• My previous business model exploited the fact that usually people who understand business are clueless about design, while I was lucky to combine both in my head. What I am doing now is exploiting the fact that people who can code (backend), usually do not understand design (frontend) either, and both of these usually do not understand user needs very well. When it comes to the niche of business presentation design, I found a way to master all three (still learning the coding part).
• There is a big difference in between being a developer in a huge organisation with 1,000s of colleagues, working on a specific feature, and coming up with an idea, designing and implementing it in a full product.
• I think it is very hard to design a completely new product by committee. Something needs to stick their neck out and do something bold, try it, change it, try it again, change it again, without the delays of too much debate about ideas and ho unfair it is that you ask people to turn around and undo/redo their work completely after 48 hours. For me on my own, there is no such thing as wasted time.

Canva acquired the free stock photo sites Pixabay and Pexels. The libraries of these companies will now be integrated in the platform (users creating documents with Canva can access the images for free).

Canva’s is a design platform with a much broader focus than “serious” business presentations: leaflets, websites, social media images, it enables small businesses to avoid paying for a graphics designer. The core revenue model is based on buying images to go into your design, and as such the acquisition makes sense.

For everyday business presentations though, I think images are actually less important, and cheesy stock images in the hands of the non-designer can actually do more damage than good. And Pixabay and Pexels have a fair share of these.

I hope Canva takes the opportunity to prune the stock image collections of these 2 companies. The player to beat is the free image web site Unsplash with images of much higher quality, but - for now - has a much smaller collection and lacks functional images that designers might need (a red bucket isolated on a white background).

The good thing of all of this is this acquisition shows investor appetite for the design market.

If you are pitching a premium offering, your product/service needs to beat/exceed the combination in terms of quality, speed, weight, or anything that is relevant in your industry sector.

But then there are the small details. People don’t go to an expensive restaurant just to enjoy crips napkins, no the food quality should be right in the first place. But the small details are important to remind and reassure your customer or investor that they made the right choice (there is always that nagging insecure voice in the back of their heads that tells them they are “suckers” who have been taking for a ride at a silly high price).

Being on time for that meeting, replacing that 1990s PowerPoint template, it is not the most important thing compared to your core product offering, or is it? You are who you portray you are.

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