SlideMagic Blog

Here is an interesting reply on Quora:

The answer seems like common sense. “Short” and “long”, “tease” and “bore”

• Don’t send a “short” 3 page slide deck crammed with font size 8 text
• Don’t send a 3 page deck that is so vague and mysterious that the VC does not understand what it is about (“do you want to share our journey that will revolutionise personal finance?”)
• Don’t send a super looooong slide deck does not get to the point even on slide 15 because you are still setting the market context and ticking of the hottest buzzwords
• Don’t send a long slide deck full of (confidential) details about your finances, product pipeline and roadmap, competitive strengths and weaknesses and the last Board decisions

“Short” and “long”, “tease” and “bore”, the smart approach sits somewhere in the middle. VCs are usually reasonably intelligent, and have likely seen many, many pitches from companies that operate in the same field as you do.

You could almost compare this to you checking out a web site of a new competitor to your business in your industry. After a few seconds, you either utter a sigh of relief, or get that feeling, “hmm, this could actually be pretty good”. The VC will look at your deck in pretty much the same way.

Photo by Paul Dufour on Unsplash

When you hit “insert slide” in my SlideMagic presentation design app, you get presented with a number of basic grid layouts for the slides.

Here is the menu you are presented with when you select “insert slide” in the SlideMagic presentation design app

Many people have asked me for these layouts in PowerPoint, so I added them to the SlideMagic template store, you can download the template bundle here.

Thumbnails of the slide layouts available in the PowerPoint template

I based the template mostly on slides that were already present in the store, so there are some deviations here and there. But, overall, these are the layouts I think should enable you to build almost any business presentation, that’s why I selected them for the app.

The file with PowerPoint templates comes with a health warning though: the reason I created the presentation design app is that it is very hard to customise template slide layouts in PowerPoint. Adding or deleting rows/columns to a grid requires some clean up and realign work that not very layman designer can do. In the template you can find more variants on the layouts of some of the slides presented here, but they probably never match your exact needs.

The app is easy to work with but integrates less well with PowerPoint, the PowerPoint templates fit right into your corporate PowerPoint template and/or colleague’s presentations, but are harder to customise. I am working hard to get rid of both these limitations.

Waterfall charts have emerged in PowerPoint for Mac after a recent software update. This would be a major addition, since these types of charts are highly useful to summarise changes in data. I have shown in previous blog posts how it is possible to construct a waterfall chart starting from a regular stacked column chart, but it involves manual calculations and PowerPoint fiddling.

The new waterfall templates for PowerPoint for Mac are a step in the right direction, but things are not perfect (yet) though. For some reason, you cannot edit the data of the waterfall that gets inserted in PowerPoint, nor can you change the design of the chart. I figured out a work around:

1. Data in the standard PowerPoint for Mac waterfall chart cannot be edited (“edit data in Excel” is grey out)

2. The only adjustment you can make is selecting a cell, and then designating it to be a total column (or not)

3. Work around: add a regular column chart

4. Make it a stacked column

5. Delete data all but one data series

I am adding designs to the template store at a healthy pace now, so it is not possible to feature every new design as a blog post. Head over to the store and check them out, this link will bring you to the latest additions. This view is chronological, and does not represent the breadth and variety of templates that are available. I encourage you to use the search box and see what comes up, it works really well now.

My objective is to get to such a variety in the store that I can move to a subscription revenue model: you can find a starter slide for every business concept you possibly would want to present. I need to find the “sweet spot”: most PowerPoint template sites offer a huge amount of slides, but very few actual concepts, mostly permutations of images and text box layouts. Stock image sites have gone the the other way: millions and millions of similar compositions, but in the process they have diluted the quality and usability of the site. And of course, an image is in most cases not a finished presentation slide. The ideal is somewhere in the middle.

Photo by Alicia Steels on Unsplash

I think people are spending way too much time on creating corporate presentation documents for internal company  meetings where the objective is to get your colleagues to agree on something that needs to happen next. Not every meeting is your all company annual sales kick off.

Presentation cliches can be effective visual shortcuts to get your point across. People have seen them before, instantly connect to the concept, and you can move on. The challenge is to make your slide look decent, maybe even referring to the cliche in a tongue-in-cheek way.

Below is what I tried to do to the infamous tip of the iceberg slide.

The tip of the iceberg presentation “classic” (or cliche?)

• Don’t try to make it look too photo realistic, but rather use an abstract simple geometrical shape, and use the presentation accent color (instead of white against a dark background)
• Keep the slide very simple, but the depth effect is actually created with clever layering of (partly semitransparent) shapes and image crops, it took me some head scratching to figure out
• Shift the whole composition to the side to leave some more space for text, if you need it.

All in all, this chart looks better than a boring list of bullet points that describe some looming threat you want to warn your colleagues about. Just resist the temptation to fill that empty piece of arctic ocean on the right or the crisp polar sky with text.

I often use the slide below in quarterly investor presentations for large corporates. How to give a quick overview of the key financials in one chart?

A chart with an overview of the main financial indicators of the last quarter

This chart is an example of why often a “manual” chart is much more powerful than a simple copy and paste from Excel:

• The chart contains values that can differ vastly in range: sales can be 100s of billions of dollars, EPS can be less than a dollar. Margins are percentages, not dollars.
• Despite this, I forced the Q1 column of each of these values to be the same. In the underlying spreadsheet, they will all say “100”. The other values are calculated as a relative value compared to this 100. To accentuate this in the chart, I connected the left columns with a dotted line.
• As a result, all labels in the chart need to be filled out by hand, the same for the growth bubbles which I placed over the columns (again a bit unusual)

You can download this KPI chart from the template store.

Photo by Sabri Tuzcu on Unsplash

I added the first organization chart to the template store. It is hard to design a generic template for organizations, there are so many different permutations possible. This is the reason they are still hard to create in my presentation design app, and this is probably also the reason that it is tricky to create beautiful organization diagrams from simply copying pasting a pre-fab template. Let’s give it a try.

Here is the process I usually go through when designing an org chart:

1. Make a sketch on paper, and reshuffle, re-juggle existing PowerPoint organigrams. These are made by HR people, not by designers. Often you can rearrange objects in such a way that you get a much nicer composition without changing hierarchies and relationships between people and departments
2. Find out the horizontal layer that has most boxes in it, this will determine the size of the horizontal grid. Find the person with the longest name / role title, which will give you a clue about the maximum font size you can use.
3. Put this layer in, and add all organization elements relevant to this layer.
4. Make sure every object is perfectly aligned, and start putting in the PowerPoint connectors. (You will immediately see when you made a small alignment glitch, the connectors will not fit nicely)
5. Now that the whole structure is in in place it is time to put in names and roles, and if required the FTE count of the various units (the small black bubbles in my example).
6. Take a step back and look at the whole structure to see whether there are opportunities to use color to make things clearer.
7. You got your reference slide was all the info about all the people in the right places, the final step is to think what your specific slide actually really needs to say: our organization is big, or organization is flat, our organization mirrors our customer segmentation, everyone in the organization is over-stretched, our organization is basically 3 silos. Start deleting, adding, coloring things just to make that point.

Loops are a powerful way to visualise reinforcing trends. Electrical engineers use them and refer to them as “system dynamics”. McKinsey consultants use them and call them “business dynamics”.

You can use them in a presentation to support your point, but make sure you don’t overcomplicate things like in the infamous US Army Spaghetti chart. Alternatively, you can use them as an analytical tool and add as much complexity as you want.

I often use some sort of loop diagram to scribble the basic story line of a presentation to make sure that I understand things myself.

When using a loop diagram in a presentation, go through different version on paper until you arrive at the most pleasing design, with the minimal amount of overlapping arrows in your spaghetti.

I have added a basic loop diagram to the template store. They are a bit tricky to make in PowerPoint, if you want all the circles and arrows to line up properly.

I am filling the store with presentation essentials. Falling domino pieces might be a cliche, but they become useful if you can actually put text on the stones, rather than simply putting a cheesy stock image as a background.

Below is a downloadable dominoes template in PowerPoint. The pieces are editable rectangular PowerPoint shapes that have been tilted in 3D. You can change the number you want, their colour, and the text inside. I have put supporting 3D lines in the composition so you can clean up things after you made the adjustments to the diagram for your specific situation.

Some presentation slide layouts have been used so many times that they have become a cliche. You know it, when you see one. In very high profile presentations, it is a good idea to take them out and replace them with a different design, to prevent the audience from thinking “Oops, it’s going to be one of those decks again”.

I am pragmatic though, and I you need to stitch together a quick deck for tomorrow’s strategy meeting, and yes, you have a case that your strategy depends on 5 pillars, I will forgive you for digging up that temple slide from the archives.

For your convenience, I have created a downloadable pillar/temple slide in the template store. This version can also come in handy when you need to address not totally stable strategies. In case you  are curious, I  have labeled some other slides as “cliche” in the template store, you can a run a search for the keyword “cliche” and see what comes up. Do you agree?