SlideMagic Blog

I have been adding a few new slides in the template store over the past few days. You can check them out here. Also, I made a lot of changes to the branding of the store, let me know what you think. The December holidays are regular workdays here in Tel Aviv, and with pretty much all my clients on holiday, this is the time of the year to catch up on these things.

The best holiday wishes here from Tel Aviv! (Photo by Josh Pepper on Unsplash)

Everyday, I am drip feeding a few new templates to the SlideMagic template bank so that after 365 days, this is likely to become the biggest collections of PowerPoint slide templates which are actually useful on the Internet.

If you are missing a specific template, let me know at jan at slidemagic dot com and I might  bump your request to the head of the queue, and maybe even email you the slide free of charge as a thank you.

Small print: all decisions to create designs and/or send them for free are up to me, so no “hey, I suggested you that slide 3 months ago, why did you not send it to me…” messages. Secondly, I am designing generic templates without your specific context (which is probably a good things, since the design will go public on the Internet after I finish it).

Photo by “My Life Through A Lens” on Unsplash

I am new to the world of eCommerce, so I had to clear up some issues with the template store that all should have been fixed now. Shipping charges that get added to a digital download, an integration partner that forgot to undo manual payment and fulfilment to test an app. Please let me know if you are experiencing any more issues.

Photo by Dana Vollenweider on Unsplash

You have been searching “SWOT” a lot in my slide template store, and got blank results. So, by popular demand, I added a SWOT slide template.

The slide is a bit too dense to put up in your next TEDTalk, but that is never the purpose of a Strengths-Weaknesses-Threats-Opportunities analysis. A SWOT is an analysis rather than a presentation tool. In my life as a strategy consultant at McKinsey, a SWOT analysis rarely solved a big strategic problem start to finish, but it is usually a great tool to get people started.

It can be especially useful in big group discussions where strategic debates can go all over the place. Putting an empty SWOT framework on a flip chart immediately calms the group down and focuses the meeting.

I expanded a bit on the traditional 2x2 (4 boxes) model: the SW, and OT boxes are now put on the side of the matrix, leaving space for 4 new boxes in the center that enable you to scribble what you are actually going to do about all these internal and external factors.

(I vividly remember that 50% of the group discussions around a SWOT whiteboard were about in which box to throw a particular thought).

Feel free to copy the design, or download the SWOT analysis ready made from the template store. You can find there more examples of strategic frameworks as well.

Team slides are tricky: there is so much to tell when you have 3 people with a 20 year career. Where to start?

I tend to split the problem in 2: put complete bio slides in the presentation appendix, and focus on a few messages about what makes that team special in the main presentation. What is the story of the team?

• Do they have diverse, complimentary backgrounds?
• Have they worked for very famous companies?
• Have they founded and sold a lot of businesses before?
• Do they have very unique scientific knowledge?
• Do they have a particularly long work experience?
• Are they a proven team, that has worked together in the past?

Each of these messages merits a completely different slide. The slide below would be an example that covers the last of the above points, a team that goes back a long time together. Rather than dry bullet points describing their background, I laid out the “CVs” horizontally on a timeline, and make very strong visual connections for periods where people overlapped at a company.

Feel free to copy the design, or download the slide from the SlideMagic template store.

I have added a free PowerPoint file to the template store. It contains 2 meeting room background to test how your slides will look in a real presentation setting. Time to fix those small fonts and graphics before you are up there tomorrow.

You can download the file here.

Project Gantt charts are a pain to create in PowerPoint. Screen dumps from professional project management software are too detailed and don’t have the right look & feel. Manually resizing blocks is tedious, and oh boy, what if you have to add or change an activity…

I often use a disguised stacked bar chart to create project flow charts in PowerPoint.

First, you need to look at the content. Like my approach with all data charts, project plans should not be copy pasted directly into PowerPoint. Project planning, data analysis, is not the same as presenting the result to an audience, you need to disconnect the two activities. This means in most cases starting with a blank sheet of paper.

Purely from the stand point of communication (not planning): which activities should be grouped together, which separated? What is a logical phasing? Sometimes, nitty gritty activity details are crucial for planning purposes (exact roll outs for each city), but can get pretty boring in a presentation. Sometimes the opposite is true, a small pilot might be worth highlighting in the presentation.

Once you have this sketch, you can transfer it to PowerPoint. PowerPoint does not have pre-configured Gantt chart templates, but the stacked bar chart can provide a solution. See the chart below as an example:

It takes a bit of thinking to set up, but once in place, it is easy to make small changes to the length of the bars and/or add and subtract activities without having to go through the hassle of lining up everything again.

One of the very first philosophical realisations I had as a child is that there is no way to figure out whether 2 humans perceive color in the same way. This article elaborates further.

This could be one explanation for the difference in taste: each human has the same sense of style, taste, but simply sees, tastes, hears in a completely different way…

Photo by Braydon Anderson on Unsplash

Here is a slide I often encounter in draft publications: a screen shot of a news web page, with a few words circled in the middle of the article. There are a few problems with this:

• The circled quote is often impossible to read
• The other elements of the web page screen shot compete for attention: the big headline, the photo. The article was not designed to focus the attention on your circled text
• Today’s web pages are crammed with screen elements that you don’t need on your slide: social media like buttons, advertising
• A screen shot of a random news web site does not carry the same credibility anymore as a cut out article of the 1935 New York Times once did

There are better way to show that piece of evidence:

• Incorporate data in a bar chart, comparing it to something, and putting the news web site in the bottom source line
• Creating a big quote page, again quoting the news web site as a source

When should you use news web sites? Maybe if the headline in a very credible news source is what you need. But then, cover unwanted screen clutter with white boxes to draw the attention of the audience to that headline, and nothing else. Here is an earlier blog post about formatting newspaper screenshots.

Photo by G. Crescoli on Unsplash