SlideMagic Blog

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?

My old Apple Thunderbolt screen has had its best time, so I find myself back with just on 5K screen on my iMac recently. And I must say: I might keep this desk configuration. It creates a nicer work environment where I can actually look out of the window (over the Mediterranean in my case), with less clutter and big bright light beams shining in your face.

There is now no longer space to keep Twitter feeds and other distractions open on your screen. Also side-by-side design work where I have a spreadsheet and a presentation open at the same time somehow works actually better: moving your eye from document to the next, and looking for that number is quicker when everything is right in front of you.

We will see what happens after a few weeks.

PowerPoint can do Photoshop-like tricks. One of them: cutting shapes out of images. Here is how to do it:

1. Drag your image on the slide
2. Draw a shape on top of it (the freehand shape allows you to create a very precise shape)
3. First select the image, then select the shape (shift click)
4. Now select the Shape Format menu
5. Click Merge Shapes
6. Click Subtract

That’s it. Below is a slide from the template store that uses this technique (you can download the ready-made slide if you want)

The final template slide

The making of

Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash

Harvey Balls are a repeating pattern of simple pie diagrams to score options among different access. Strategy consultants love them because it allows you to make qualitative assessments quickly. They work great on group discussion whiteboards as well: draw the empty circles and have the meeting participants colour them in.

Apparently they were invented at Booz Allen in the 1970s, which is probably why we at McKinsey referred to them as “moons”.

In PowerPoint they are a bit tricky to make, in the template below I tried to make an effort. To change the values, you need to open each pie diagram and change its value, make sure that you are not moving or re-scaling any of the pie diagrams in the process.

At McKinsey, I remember always keeping a “moon” diagram somewhere in my hard drive, so I could easily re-use the various shapes (these were not Excel pie diagrams, but graphic icons that came in the four stages).

Visually, I think they are not perfect. Maybe in the early 1990s, with primitive computer graphics, Harvey balls served a purpose, but now the same effect can equally be achieved by applying different colour shadings in the background colour of the cells in your table.

As always, feel free to copy the design, or download the ready-made slide from the template store.

My slide layouts usually have a white frame around them, even big images I don not let “bleed” of the page. Why? My slide decks are usually a mix of these minimalist big image slides and more traditional, dense, consulting-type slides. The big pictures usually go in the front of the deck to sell the idea, but for financials, roadmaps, etc. I need a different format. Mixing two styles of presentations gives the deck an inconsistent look.

(The exception would be tracker pages, or section separators, which I usually stretch over a full page).

That “box” gives you some new design opportunities though; you can make things pop out by putting them outside the frame on purpose. This is technique that is often used on magazine covers. Below are some slides from the store where I used this technique (clicking them takes you to the store).

Trees like the one below are a great way to communicate a formula or a business model. It shows how factors are related. It forces you to “fill in the blanks”. For example, if you think you are going to get 200,000 customers in Luxembourg, you need to relate that to the overall population somehow. It makes assumptions very visible, and separates the ones which are relatively certain, from those which are wild guesses.

Business model tree

A business model tree - inverted

Use the tree to triangulate your own view of a business model or forecast, then show it to your audience and convince them of the numbers.

I always make my trees left-to-right, McKinsey style, where you would take someone from the big picture to the smaller details. Some clients have a preference for doing it the other way around, going from inputs to the final result.

Feel free to borrow this design idea, or download the ready-made slide from the SlideMagic template store.

Photo by kazuend on Unsplash