SlideMagic Blog

There are 2 types of software approaches for writing add-ins for Microsoft Office applications: so called VSTOs, and web applications. VSTO is the older technology. It integrates deeply into Office and the Windows operating system, code is written in C#. This restriction to Windows is the reason that all PowerPoint plug ins and extensions run on Windows at the moment. The web application API is the newer approach, allowing you to code applications with standard Javascript/HTML.

This has huge advantages:

• It runs on all platforms and devices, not just Windows.
• Any coder who knows Javascript/HTML can hit the ground running with developing apps, a far bigger developer community than people who know their way around VSTO/C#.
• It is a lot easier to integrate these Office web apps into existing web applications (such as SlideMagic).

I have a lot of ideas to extend PowerPoint beyond the current plugins that offer in-app access to stock photo sites but… PowerPoint is at the bottom of the priority list when it comes to API development at Microsoft. Excel, Outlook, and to a certain extend Word, get priority. Specifically, the ability to manipulate slide content is very limited (put text in the currently selected text block, or place an image somewhere on the page).

PowerPoint is the key communication tool that is used in corporates (not Word). PowerPoint is tricky to master (50% to blame on software, 50% to blame on the “eye for design” that not everyone has). Combine these 2 and it is the biggest opportunity for 3rd party developers to make a change to business communication, make a financial return for both developers and Microsoft, and make PowerPoint stand out over Apple Keynote.

The pitch deck is usually the first piece of marketing material a startup needs (“Oh no, we need a logo as well”), next up: the web site.

If your company has not launched yet, and/or your company is not about being a highly interactive game (i.e., the web site is not the product), seed company web sites can be very simple (and easy/cheap) to make.

The objective is to create a credible business card for your company that supports your pitch to investors and/or partners and/or potential customers

A check list:

• Get a decent domain name and use it as your email address as well
• Get an ad-free account with a web site platform such as squarespace or wix.
• Set up the colors, logo, so everything looks consistent with the pitch deck(s) you are sending out
• Check the content for your “business card”:
  • Is it clear what the company does (if you are not in stealth mode)
  • Is everything up to date (including the © in the footer), names of products, people, investors, board members, etc. etc.
  • Are all the social media accounts hooked up (if they are active, no need to link to that Google Plus domain you got)
  • Is there a good team section: consistent head shots, work experience, links to LinkedIn profiles, twitter accounts
  • Proper and up to date contact details: a Google street view search does not take you to your parent’s house.
  • If your legal name is different than the one you are trading with, put it somewhere in the footer for people who do background checks on the company.
• Images, diagrams are consistent with your pitch decks, take it easy with stock images and videos of culturally diversified teams working happily together that do not resemble the head shots in your team section (if they do however, this could be a great background to put up).
• The things loads quickly and shows up decently in all possible platforms.
• Check typos.
• Cut verbose, fluffy buzzwords

I am starting to get my head around building applications for Microsoft Office / PowerPoint, and this can be done easier on a Windows machine, so I am now pretty much all day working in a Microsoft environment on Apple hardware. (Don’t worry, the result of the effort will run on Windows and Mac).

The whole Windows experience is fantastic and completely at par with a Mac. As I said in a post before, I now consider PowerPoint to be a better presentation program than Keynote, and PowerPoint for Windows is better than PowerPoint for Mac.

The only issue for me is to get the Apple keyboard and mouse properly integrated with the workflow (scroll directions, knowing where certain keys are, and getting used to the difference between CMD and CTRL). (And… the Logic Pro X music software does not run on Windows).

Cover image by Timothy Eberly on Unsplash

I think the success rate of convincing people in political rants/debates is exactly 0%, and this tweet reminds me of that:

Some things to remember when convincing people:

• You can probably only convince people that are somewhat in the center between view points, forget about those who are extreme/too far away.
• Telling your opponents that you are stupid, is a sure guarantee that they refuse to even listen to you (or people probably have to like you somewhat in order to believe you).
• Getting a resounding round of applause and lots of likes by people who agree with you is nice, but is no success indicator whether you changed anyone’s mind
• Think what moves people on the other side, then work backwards to how that relates to their viewpoint on the specific issue that is on the table.
• People are not segmented in 2 camps across all issues (the way it looks like on election day), so stereotyping is unlikely to work.

(* End of rant *)

Cover image by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

I am currently reading the book “How Music Works” by David Byrne (Talking Heads). Off topic: it is a fascinating study about creating and perceiving music, highly recommended.

In the book, he talks about how music software is influencing music creation and draws parallels with what PowerPoint is doing to presentations:

“With the Microsoft presentation software PowerPoint , for example , you have to simplify your presentations so much that subtle nuances in the subjects being discussed often get edited out . These nuances are not forbidden , they’re not blocked , but including them tends to make for a less successful presentation . Likewise , that which is easy to bullet - point and simply visualize works better . That doesn’t mean it actually is better ; it means working in certain ways is simply easier than working in others .”

Byrne, David. How Music Works (p. 132). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.

I agree that a good presentation irons out subtleties and nuances, but I would not call this dumbing down. A 10 minute presentation needs to get the investment pitch done with a very pragmatic objective of getting to the next stage of due diligence. In a sense you can compare it to the hit single with the simple hook that can create interest for the broader work of the artist.

Image via WikiPedia

When you are going on your first fund raising round, you need to stand out from the crowd in 2 ways: 1) investors need to remember you, 2) investors need to remember you as a company they want to invest in.

Creating an over the top, crazy, original, cutesy, pitch deck will score you point 1, but it is a risky bet, 1 does not automatically lead to 2.

I can’t find the exact blog post to link to, but Seth Godin always preaches to look like the company you want to be. And in startup fundraising, it is pretty much the same. Early pitch decks of successful companies that got funded just have that look of companies who get funded. Yes, a tautology.

It is very hard to copy a certain look. Try and copy the look & feel of a famous poster in your presentation, and it almost always comes out differently. It is very difficult for the brain to look and reproduce things objectively. Yes, the margins are a bit smaller, the fonts are different, what is wrong with using black instead of dark grey. Each change is small, but they all add up.

Don’t copy an old pitch deck slide-by-slide, but step back and put yourself in the shoes of an investor, and reverse engineer why she decided to put in her money after reading/seeing the slides.

Cover image by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

In my spare time, I like to play electronic musical instruments. Recently, I amassed all my courage together, and started writing my own music, and send it carefully to a few selected friends, forcing myself to feel the responsibility of creating something for an audience.

It is very hard to communicate a musical idea in raw form, and it feels a bit like the curse of knowledge. The expert cannot explain an idea because she has all the context in her head that others lack. When I tap a melody on the table, I hear a symphony, the audience hears tapping.

So, sending over a basic chord progression and a rough melody line with a plastic drum beat, some strings, and a piano is not cutting it. Now, what gave me some encouragement, is to try and play famous songs using exactly these tools, going the other way.

Let’s see what happens.

Cover image by Steve Harvey on Unsplash

As I am diving deeper and deeper into my effort to brush up my coding skills from where I left in with a Computer Science degree in 1992, I am surprised by how difficult it is to interpret code. Yes, coding languages have become very “compact”: a simple expression can do incredibly things: define an object that returns a function which in itself returns an array objects where each property is again a function. The language is incredibly efficient, but it takes some head scratching to understand it. A bit like the English “42” is a shortcut for a  more elaborate explanation of the meaning of life.

There is a parallel here to building Excel models. I have probably spent a good part of a decade building financial models that value companies or evaluate strategies. You can also be very efficient in Excel:

1. Putting very long and elaborate formulas in just one cell saves you a lot of rows with subtotals and other intermediary steps of calculations
2. Using advanced Excel functions that calculate a value for you as a black box

I never used any of the above for these reasons:

• Errors, for example including the first row of your spreadsheet with the years (1993, 1994, 1995…) into your cash flow. A small mistake can make your model of by a few billion dollars.
• Changing models the next morning. If everything is spelled out it is easy to add a market, a scenario, change an assumption
• Changing models six months later, elaborate models are much easier to understand.
• An elaborate model makes it easy to spot other interesting insights, why valuations are different, and what actually makes the difference, and what is totally irrelevant.

Now and then, I go back and analyse the inroad that mobile devices have, and have not made, on mobile devices, after the state of euphoria we all had back in 2010.

As a viewing device, phones and tablets have made great progress. In a significant number of face-to-face and small conference table meetings, people are using mobiles and tablets to present theirs slides.

As a creation device though, things are not that advantaged. And now that we have apps that do  perfectly fine job at creating presentations on a tablet, we can no longer blame it on technology. Here are some reasons why it is (and will remain) difficult to create presentations on a tablet (let alone phone):

Presentation design is a creative process that requires a big, bold, clutter-free work environment. This means it will always work better with a big screen, a nice big desk to work on, and a quiet environment. Trying to type things on a small screen in a crowded cafe, or in the back of the taxi will never create brilliant presentations.

The default work setting for creating a presentation is the office, and, when given a choice, the small tablet is inferior to the laptop or desktop computer.

File management is still tricky on small screens. Having 3 presentation decks open, plus 2 spreadsheets, plus the dashboard with last quarter’s results in the BI system, plus a stock photo site, plus 4 old emails with attachments that contain slides, is by definition hard to manage on a tablet.

The question “can you give some more info on this” after your first pitch almost always gets answered by another slide deck. These “follow on decks” have a different purpose and context than your main pitch deck:

• The audience knows/has bought into the main idea of your story, so no need for “emotional story telling drama” here, the recipient just wants to get specific questions answered here.
• The content of the slides will be more factual, data-intense
• The substance of the deck is likely to be very specific for this particular requester, and you are unlikely to have time to invest 2 weeks of design effort in follow up slides to dozens of investors / prospects.

Some design guide lines for these types of decks:

• Answer the questions asked in a focused way, don’t just dump more slides from the appendix in a new file. You can even set up the deck in a sequence of alternating trackers with the question, plus a slide with the answer.
• Don’t stick in the exact same slides as you had in your first deck. People can read/hear, and apparently they were not clear enough the first time around. If you have to, use an existing slide that she already has seen, but add big circles, or bright explanation boxes with the required clarification
• Use a sober, down-to-earth format (like the one used here at SlideMagic), that makes you look credible and professional, transparent (no flashy graphics are needed to clarify your points), and efficient (you did not waste a lot of time/money on over polishing a deck that is basically just a quick memo).