SlideMagic Blog

I will be spending time away from my desk over the next few weeks, posts will be less frequent than usual. I hope all of you are having a great summer as well.

Cover image by Maxwell Gifted on Unsplash

This was the title of a recent article in the Economist. (The link is behind a paywall*). The general idea is that corporate mission statements are all the same, and are totally not credible. A company’s mission and values is communicated by how it behaves, not what it says on the web site.

What does it mean for presentations? Putting your company’s mission statement on page 1 is unlikely to get your audience to move to the edges of their seats.

• I actually tried licensing the content, which took me through an interesting process. “Do you want print as well?”. “Please list all the countries where you want to use it” (Worldwide was not an option in the drop down). “How many months?”. And in the dropdown menu of “who are you?”, the blogger did not show up. In the end The Economist suggested GBP 500 for linking to an article for just one month that might have gotten them more subscribers.

Cover image by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash

Design mistakes happen to the best of us. See this screen shot of a blog post from a few days ago. The image the looks black and white, is actually not black and white. It is always good to remove all colour from all images, even when they appear to be black and white already.

In PowerPoint you do this in picture format - colour, see the screen shot below.

Cover image by Oleg Laptev on Unsplash

I thought this comment exchange on a post of a few days ago is worth sharing with all of you:

Disqus embedding is not perfect, here is the discussion:

Question: My presentation looks very formal for a first-level discussions. I need a way to turn presentation to rough sketches. Is there an app or an easy way to transform my formal presentation slides into paper napkin sketches?

**My reply:**I am not sure you need paper sketch-style slides to make your presentation look less formal. I would loosen up the existing design, cutting words, changing language, etc. One way to do this is to find another presentation somewhere with an informal style you like, now copy the style of the template and re-create your existing presentation so that it exactly fits this model. I am pretty confident that in the end, you will discard your “formal” presentation all together and run with your new deck in all meetings (both formal and informal).

If you insist on making “sketchy” presentations, here are two approaches:

1. Apple Keynote has rougher border styles. combine this with a custom hand-writing-style font
2. The manual way: recreate your presentation but leave selected bits out (boxes, maybe certain charts, arrows), print it, take a big marker, draw in the elements, scan the thing to PDF. It will look really good, but is hard to edit.
3. A variant on this: take a print out of the half-finished deck to your meeting, and complete the charts on the spot, “live”. This could work in a meeting setting.

Business plans are usually “mechanical” documents: systematic analysis of markets, competitors, economics, milestones, etc… It is the document trail of a strategy consulting project. Hard work, systematic, rigorous (hopefully).

For investors, it can be comforting that you can rest your hand on a beefy pile of paper, she will be confident that you have thought things through as best as you could, and that there is some direction and a sense of budget in that early stage company.

But, business plans make long and boring reads. They are structured as, well, a business plan, not an exciting story. Text is usually written in one go, as information is captured: creating duplications, side tangents, and an excess of buzzwords that were not zapped by an editor. Also, they are often written by more than one person, adding inconsistent styles on top of the duplications.

A good investor presentation (or even a good “business plan edited for investors”), is more like a “voice over” (lots of quotation marks in this post), of they dry exhaustive, duplicate, raw, business plan. Let’s pause on this diagram that shows you exactly what we are doing, now look at this market in a new way, see this picture that shows why all existing solutions are so poor, in this long list of competitors there is this guy we should be worried about, look the CVs of our team, we all have a Phd in [x], yes I know, the obvious, elephant in the room question is [y], the answer is on page 35, etc. etc.

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