SlideMagic Blog

When starting a new slide, most people think of what to write in it, then worry about composition which usually involves moving text boxes around so that everything still fits on one page.

Next time, start with the composition, then do the writing. Think how a few boxes and arrows can visualise common business concepts in a slide:

• Something is bigger than another
• Something is growing
• Torn between opposing forces
• Reinforcing loops
• Ideal fit or a mismatch
• Trade off
• Dead end
• A sequence

Put the shapes, align and distribute them, now add some text

Cover image by dylan nolte on Unsplash

Often your manager will ask you to put some more “factoids” on the slide: small, vaguely relevant bits of information related to the topic that have no natural home on any specific slide in the deck. Read that description again, and think whether the audience really needs more of them.

Cover image by quan le on Unsplash

This tweet says it all:

Yes conference organisers want to 1) ensure that the presentations they offer are decent, 2) make sure the workflow of decks one after the other works on the conference desktop, but… most speakers will make changes to slides (especially the slide order) when they are rehearsing for the performance.

Suggested strategy:

• Ask for a rough draft, outline, or old presentation well in advance of the conference to eliminate potential issues in terms of presentation style and technicalities (fonts, etc.)
• Create a very credible deadline shortly before the conference for the actual slides.

Cover image by Curtis MacNewton on Unsplash

I am dusting of my coding skills that were pretty much put on hold in the early 1990s and have started to program macros to automate the mechanics of the template store: creating individual slides and thumbnails for PowerPoint and Keynote in different aspect ratios of these design.

Things in the Microsoft Office ecosystem run smoothly (“VBA”), for Mac, a lot less so. Applescript is a language that aims to automate pretty much everything you can do in Mac OS. It has been around for a very long time, but it is falling short.

At first sight, the language looks very friendly, almost human-like. And here is a problem: human language is ambiguous. It is incredibly hard to use it to program computers. When I look at example Applescript code, it looks very easy to adjust and re-use, but it is an incredibly pain to get it actually working and iron out the last bugs. Writing macro scripts will never be something that the average Apple user will do, so you might as well stick to a programming language that an engineer can work with.

The second problem is the what Applescript can actually do. As Apple put development of Mac OS on the back burner and gave priority to its iOS devices, the functional power of Applescript has been watered down. Old tutorials online show functionality that has been removed in later versions of Keynote.

Now, I am not saying that all esoteric features should be supported in a scripting language, but I am struggling to get the most obvious and basic one that anyone wants to use a Keynote script for: batch conversion of PowerPoint files into Keynote.

Most presentation drafts I receive from clients are a soup of different slide templates, with colours, fonts, and styles all mixed up. To clean things up takes so much time that in most cases, making a slide from scratch is faster.

The combination of PowerPoint’s architecture (going back to the 1990s) and large groups of people collaborating on documents is the toxic cocktail that causes all of this. My app and my template store are my first attempts to put an end to this.

In the absence of a permanent solution, here is what you can do to vaccinate yourself against the worst cases:

• Ask some one marketing communication to email you the original clean template, and see how it works. Likely, it does not. Delete master slides you do not need.
• Create a rectangular shape that you like: correct colours, correct font. Make sure the bullet points align when you drop to the next line. Right click the shape, and set as default
• Repeat the same for a plain text box.
• Now, every presentation that you create, either starts with this blank master totally empty, or you copy someone else’s presentation into this master.
• And share your clean template freely with anyone who is interested.

(Or, start with an empty SlideMagic template, download it here for free)

Cover image by Pascal Kahle on Unsplash

You used to design a deck for presenting live, and then tweak it a bit to make it suitable for sending / reading in an email. More and more, I end up doing the opposite (at least for fund raising pitches). You create a deck that can be understood without a live presenter, and then make adjustments for an in-person pitch.

• Business communication gets more efficient in general: fewer, shorter meetings, informal communication
• People (think they) know how to read a fund raising pitch, in a sense their structures are very similar
• More and more pitches happen between fund raisers and investors in different locations (lots of pitches to Asian investors)

Your old enemy was the audience falling asleep, checking out by opening the smartphone, the new enemy is the mouse click (page down, or worse: “close”). Given this, it is as difficult to design a good deck meant for reading than it is to create a TEDTalk-style deck for stand up presentations.

Cover image by Kristina Tripkovic on Unsplash

The last time I used macros in PowerPoint was probably back in the 1990s during my time as an analyst at McKinsey. Yesterday, I picked things up again where I left them of.

To my surprise, the record function is no longer available (at least on a Mac). This used to be my secret weapon: record something very roughly, analyse the automatically generated code, and re-write that in a better way. The fastest way to learn the macro language.

Now you have to go through the process of learning VBA via the MSDN website. For someone with a Computer Science degree (i.e., me), this is doable, but I am afraid, anyone else will get lost.

Macros are still very hard to make idiot proof. Giving non-technical users access to a neat button in their ribbon that does magic probably works 70%, but in 30% of the cases, it will either not work, or worse: do damage to their work.

I need macros to speed up my production time of slides for the template store. Highly repetitive work is the bottleneck: creating thumbnail images, creating the individual PowerPoint and Keynote slides, in different aspect ratios, and creating the product pages on the store.

I toyed briefly with the idea of outsourcing this to other designers, but after a few days of study, I might have found a way to automate the bulk of the work, which will save me a tremendous amount of time and reduce errors, and free up my hands to increase the speed at which I can add slides to the store dramatically.

This tweet made me scratch my head, it seems so counter intuitive:

If you create a little waterfall, you can see the effect better. In both cases, the delta is half the size of the bigger column.

Yes, using logarithmic scales would be the correct mathematically thing to do, but they are very hard for people other than mathematicians to get their head around.

Read an earlier blog post about constructing waterfall charts in presentations. Cover image by Ross Findon on Unsplash

The standard Excel/PowerPoint legends for data charts are hard to decipher:

• They are written in a small font
• They rely on colours that the reader needs to match up with the corresponding data series
• They are positioned away from the actual data

I usually switch off the legends and make them by hand. What I lose in automation, I gain in clarity. See in the example slide below:

• I put the legend in big text to the right of a column chart (the last year is usually the most relevant for the audience)
• Instead of color, I use the order of the legends to match them with the data. The color is received for highlighting a data series that is particularly important. This is easier on the eye, less clutter.

Click the image to see the column chart in the template store, subscribers can download it free of charge. Cover image by David Travis on Unsplash.

Survey data can be tricky to present. So much data, so many breakdowns, where to start? Here is my take.

First, let Excel make “dumb” data visualisations, simply use the automated tools of the spreadsheet to visualise the results somehow. Use this data to analyse / what is actually going on. While a chart for a live audience should be clear in 5 seconds, these charts are for you, and it might take you a couple of hours before you have figured out what the most important trends in the data are. When finished, all these charts go in an appendix of the document.

Now write down what the key messages of the survey are, and find the data that specifically support that message. One message per slide! Next, find the most appropriate data chart that can present that data. I often see people mix up columns (time series), pies (harder to read than stacked columns), and bar charts (rankings).

Below are 2 designs that can be useful for survey data that cut across different segments. The first is the classical approach: a series of column charts. The first one shows the entire population, the second and third give a breakdown for specific segments.

Here is a slightly unusual variation for this chart. I went back to table and duplicated the axis labels for each segment. This table highlights the order/ranking stronger than the value of the actual data point. To add more clarity, I colour-coded the ranked data for one sub segment (not the total!). This brings out the contrast between the segments better.