A new way to organise my presentation templates

I am experimenting with a new way to organise SlideMagic presentation templates and started adding them to www.slidemagic.com/templates. I will be adding more over the coming days. Please let me know if you have request for specific slide concepts I should add and I will see whether I can help you.

Counting the boxes

The first thing I do for almost any slide is "counting the boxes": how many points does each argument have, how many people are there on the team, how many layers to the technology, how many steps in the process.

This drives the layout of the slide: 2 columns with options and 3 arguments each, a 5-step value chain, a 6 x 4 grid of logos, 5 management bios next to each other, 10 columns of sales data, etc. This layout will make sure that your slide looks evenly spaced out. You are also see that in most cases, the (bullet point) list grid structure is actually not the one you need.

PowerPoint and Keynote do not have very strong grid capabilities. Spacing out equally sized boxes across a slide is a pain, and table editing is not much better. And that is why I made the grid structure the central feature of my own presentation app SlideMagic, try it out!

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Art: Perspective box, Pieter Janssens Elinga, 1623

How to present pros and cons

A question came in on Twitter the other day:

@ideatransplant How to discuss pros and cons of 4 things? What sort of layout would you prefer?

— Yoni Tantra (@yonitantra) January 3, 2016

My answer is: a simple table, like this one I prepared quickly in my presentation app SlideMagic (you can clone it to your own SlideMagic account in the presentation template file that contains on the slides I have used on this blog).

The difference between a good pro/con slide and a bad one is not the design in itself, it is how your present the argument. A presentation slide is a tool to get a decision, it is not a laundry list of pros and cons that you evaluated in your analysis. Put your analysis aside, and design from a blank sheet of paper:

• Group similar arguments together, if an argument is sort of the same, combine them
• Sort the rows in the table in such a way that things visually line up. For example you start with rows where both options are "good" (all blues), then do the "OK/good"s, then the "OK/OK"s. etc.
• Isolated and focus those arguments that are going to drive the decision and/or are controversial. "Option 1 is cheaper, option 2 is faster but the what will make the difference is whether we think [criterion 3] is important.
• Cut words rigorously until you have a page that is still meaningful but does not look cluttered.

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Art: weighing of the heart versus the feather of truth

The broken Apple Keynote interface, is it me?

I have now created many, many client presentations in Apple Keynote. And most of the clients who request a presentation in Keynote rather than PowerPoint are proud that they are willing to use more design-oriented products. For many years, Apple Keynote was ahead of PowerPoint: a cleaner user interface, cleaner templates, those alignment guides that pop up when you want to position an object. And in addition, you were using the same product that Steve Jobs, the master presenter, was using for his slides.

With the latest release of PowerPoint, I think both applications are at par. With each one of them, you can create both beautiful presentations, and horrible decks full of bullet point slides.

The workflow of Keynote though makes me scratch my head. While more complicated tasks are taken care of very well, it is the basic functions such as changing fill colours, font colours, aligning, that drives me crazy. Too many clicks, and I am always looking where to click. Initially I though it was me, but after month and months of trying things are still not getting better.

PowerPoint has a more cluttered interface but after some time working with it your eyes look on locations/icons and you instantly click without having to think. The solution for both programs is clear: create space for one user customisable tool bar. PowerPoint for Mac had one, but it disappeared with the 2016 update, Keynote needs one.

The above partly informed the design of my own presentation design app SlideMagic. You actually need very few functions to create beautiful charts. Most reviews of software tools are still 1990 style: a comparison of features. What you really should be measuring is how fast/easy it is to get a decent end product. Hopefully Microsoft and Apple are not reading this post, so SlideMagic can keep its competitive advantage!

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Image of an A380 cockpit from Wikipedia

Example PowerPoint conversions

Many of you are requesting PowerPoint conversions of the templates that ship with SlideMagic. You will see that the conversion works nicely, but that it is inconvenient to make structural slide edits in the PowerPoint version of the file, doing them in SlideMagic is much easier.

If you want to check out how converted SlideMagic presentations look, I have put the files all in this shared Google Drive folder.

Combining tables and data charts

Lining up a data chart and a table in PowerPoint or Keynote is very tricky. And that is a shame, because it is one of the most useful compositions to present data. Just tables, and you cannot really see the trends. Just data charts, and it all becomes cluttered.

I took the data from an earlier blog post and quickly turned it into a combined table/data chart. You can clone the slides I create in presentation app SlideMagic into your own SlideMagic account by clicking this link.

Convert SlideMagic presentations to PowerPoint

Many people have asked for this feature. I might have found a partially automated solution for this. Partially means, slides are converted automatically, but the overall workflow is still manual.

Before I start investing a lot of resources (time and money) in developing a fully automated solution, I want to test demand. Soon, I will be adding a "PowerPoint" button to SlideMagic, but in the interim, you can email to (ppt at slidemagic dot com) an editable link of your presentation (generate it via the SHARE menu in SlideMagic) and we will send you back a PowerPoint file.

It is important to send the link using the SHARE function, nobody but you can open the links in your browser for privacy/security reasons.

Make sure that you have the Roboto Condensed font installed on your machine. It is a free font provided by Google

1. Exit PowerPoint
2. Go to the Roboto Condensed download page
3. Tick the 400 and 700 boxes
4. Download using the "arrow down" icon at the top right
5. Double click the downloaded files to install the fonts
6. Re-open PowerPoint

Roboto Condensed cannot be installed on iOS devices. If you want to edit your converted SlideMagic presentation in PowerPoint for iOS consider replacing the Roboto Condensed font for Helvetica Neue Condensed. Here is how to swap fonts across an entire presentation on a Mac. But hey, SlideMagic runs pretty well in Safari on iPad, no need to convert to PowerPoint for this.

Some disclaimers:

• It is a partially manual solution, please be patient, delivery can be instant or take some time.
• A human will open your presentation, we are nice people and unlikely to read it all in detail and/or post things on the Internet though. Still some corporate compliance regulations might have an issue with this
• There might be glitches in the quality of the conversion, if so, we would like to hear about them.

You will see that the end result looks pretty decent and small text edits work great, but - and this is the reason I created SlideMagic - if you want to make fundamental edits to a SlideMagic slide in PowerPoint you will hit the limitations of PowerPoint. For example, adding a row or column to your grid and getting everything to line up nicely is a small operation. I suspect you will quickly go back into SlideMagic, do the edit there, and convert again. Hopefully, in the end you will just forget about the conversion and stay inside SlideMagic.

So, hopefully the option of converting your SlideMagic presentation to PowerPoint will give you increased confidence to try it out, there is nothing to lose, you can always fall back to good old PowerPoint.

Not a SlideMagic user yet? Sign up here.

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Image credit

Multiple weak signals make a strong one

I played around with the new "connectors" in my presentation app SlideMagic and used them to create a chart that visualises how multiple weak signals can come together into a strong one. I have added this chart to the SlideMagic template with charts that I discussed on the blog, you can clone it to your SlideMagic account here.

Presentations on mobile devices - taking stock

Five years after the iPad launch let's take a step back and see what is actually happening in the world of presentation software and the use of mobile devices. My observations are based on the people I see around me everyday: startup employees (mostly mid 30s to 40s) and staff in big corporates (a bit older).

• Designing. Apple has made a big inroad in terms of hardware, but it is still PowerPoint that runs on a laptop machine that is the preferred set up to create slides. I have not encountered anyone who uses a mobile device to do this. Apple Keynote is pretty much still a niche application.
• Frankensteining / finding stuff. Cloud-based file systems can be confusing to use. I still do not understand exactly what happens when Keynote on iPad tells me it is converting a regular Keynote file. In practice, the file system that everyone is using is.... the email inbox and sent box. People with gmail can find stuff faster than Outlook users.
• Viewing. Yes, more and more, people use their mobile devices to view a presentation. And it is not the iPad, a tablet, it is the mobile phone, where people squint to see what is in the slides. These are investors looking at a pitch deck, these are managers/superiors proving input on a slide. Think about it, this might be a more important audience for your slides than the ones sitting in conference room.
• Emergency edits. Still laptop, although a tablet could work here, few people use it in a corporate setting.
• Coffee chat, 1 on 1. Mostly laptop, I see fewer iPad/tablets than I saw 1-2 years ago.
• Conference room. Laptop. The crappy VGA projector is being replaced by crappy LCD screens. Presentations that look beautiful on your retina display, look absolutely horrible on an LCD screen with poor resolution and overly bright settings. (Test, test, test). Advanced meeting rooms now allow you to airplay your presentations into the screen. People use their laptops to do this, not their mobile devices.
• Big keynote. Conference laptop with a memory stick plugged in.

So what is really changing? People are viewing decks on mobile phones, especially busy people that might not be overly motivated to see your pitch (investors in round 0 of the due diligence process for example).

Presentation gurus like me used to discourage dense bullet points because you can't (too small) and don't want (too boring) to read them in the back row. Now it is a bit more subtle. You can't read small text on a mobile screen. But, more and more desks are read without a presenter being present and you actually need some text to explain things properly.

In SlideMagic, I encourage big, bold, but extremely simple designs (that will come through nicely on a mobile device), plus I left space on the side for a regular explanation paragraph.

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Image on WikiPedia

SlideMagic on iPad

I have never been a big believer in focussed and productive presentation design on tablets, but presenting documents (mostly in 1-on-1 meetings) and making last minutes edits are important on mobile devices.

We are not making tablets a design priority, but have deployed some changes to the code that makes SlideMagic run pretty smoothly on an iPad (iPhone is still not optimal). Try it out and report back any bugs. Android tablet users, let me know what happens (I have not tried things out there yet).

With the large iPad Pro coming out later this year, there could be a brighter future for SlideMagic on iPad given the very simple menu structure we use.

Screen shot of SlideMagic on my iPad Mini 2

Thoughts on user interfaces

As I am making progress with my presentation design app SlideMagic, I spend a lot of time thinking about user interfaces (UI) for office applications.

Part of the reason that it is so hard to wean people of Microsoft Office applications is that they have gotten used to the mouse/click/dropdown user interface. Spreadsheets, word processors (who uses them still?) and presentation design software all basically have that same UI.

The drop down UI started out pretty simple. File, edit, help menus. Over the years ribbons and tool bars have complicated things. Most people now use a fraction of the functionality that is available to them. As soon as a program does not have that familiar dropdown UI, people are in trouble. I had a hard time understanding the new Adobe Acrobat UI. It is beautifully simple, but it takes time to figure out how to do very basic operations (zooming in and out, combining multiple files into one, rotating mixed up pages of a scan).

Over the past years, user have gotten to know a second UI: the mobile device. The solution for office apps is super simple functionality that draws heavily on icons, UI elements that we have learned from mobile devices.

See how it can work in SlideMagic.

Facebook is a bad way to read this blog

If you are following this blog through facebook, there is a big change that you will have missed many posts. Since I am investing my funds in SlideMagic features and not yet in marketing, I cannot afford to buy facebook ads. The best way to follow the blog is via a good old RSS or email subscription. You can add yourself to the list here: subscribe.

That email list is purely for blog updates, only people who opted in for SlideMagic product updates after registering for the app might get the occasional product update email.

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Art: Vincent van Gogh, Postman Joseph Roulin, 1889

SlideMagic versus PowerPoint

Some interesting feedback from SlideMagic beta testers:

• I promised some SlideMagic beta testers to convert the presentation to PowerPoint in the end (there is not yet an automated feature that does that), and it is encouraging to see that these users are postponing that conversion again and again. 
• For some clients I quickly re-do a short presentation in SlideMagic. Client response: the SlideMagic one looks better, why can't you do that in PowerPoint? Answer 1): SlideMagic uses a pretty font, not Arial, and 2) the corporate PowerPoint template has a slightly less elegant composition of the slide (position of titles, margins etc.)
• Some clients want the templates that ship with SlideMagic in PowerPoint. After sending them, there are issues with modifying the template in PowerPoint, adjustments that take a second in SlideMagic
• Some users ask where you can upload PowerPoint slides to convert them instantly to SlideMagic, that will not be possible I am afraid.

Most users are hesitant to switch because 1) it requires changing 20 years of presentation design habits, and 2) yes I admit, SlideMagic had a few bugs that need sorting out. As we make progress with the app, that second excuse becomes less relevant. SlideMagic is slowly reaching the production release.

If you have not tried SlideMagic, you should, Try it here.

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Art: Gulliver Exhibited to the Brobdingnag Farmer (painting by Richard Redgrave)

Columns versus rows and other table design issues

When making a table, what to put in columns, what to put in rows? There is no absolute rule here, but this is what I consider when deciding (some of these can contradict each other).

• It easier to fit lots of rows then lots of columns.
• Long labels go in rows
• Year on year trend: years go in columns
• Feature/competitor comparison: features in the rows

The most important things is that you never should assume that the layout in which the source data was presented to you is the best way to put that table on a slide. Next to swapping rows and columns consider:

• Shortening column labels
• Re-sorting rows and columns so that check marks / similar table content is grouped together
• Group together multiple rows, or multiple columns if their content is the same as the neighbour
• Cut text as much as you can in table cells. Side comments and sentences can go in the footnote
• Design a table at 2 levels: Level 1 (using colouring of cells) to communicate the pattern/conclusion, level 2 (using text) the explanation of the colouring for when people read the slides after the presentation
• Harmonise column widths and row heights to get a grid pattern that is as calm as possible
• Avoid boxes/outline lines, rather work with light grey boxes

Users of my presentation design app SlideMagic do not have to worry about a lot of these things, the app will do it form them. 

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Art: Mondrian dresses by Yves Saint Laurent shown with a Mondrian painting in 1966.

New SlideMagic video tutorials

I am in the process of creating a library of video tutorials for SlideMagic. Here are the first three, you can expand them to full screen size for more detail.

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From the 3x3 grid to a basic slide composition

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How to clone a template

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How to import individual slides from another presentation/template

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Art: William Merritt Chase, A Friendly Call, 1895.

Adding structure to text

Sentences or titles never have the same length, so putting them on a page without some form of framing makes the whole slide look unbalanced. My solution: a light grey background  creates a box that gives structure to the text. You can also use images to reinforce the slide's grid layout. Many people use an outline, a frame around text for the same purpose. I think a light box fill looks a lot better.  

The light grey box is one of the key structuring elements in my presentation design app SlideMagic. Traditional presentation design software is not very well set up to changing grids of text boxes and images. Try doing it in PowerPoint, then try to do the same thing in SlideMagic.

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Art: Piet Mondriaan, Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942

Makeover of the Buffer pitch deck that landed them $500k

When Googling for examples of VC pitch decks, the on that Buffer used to raise $500k in 2013 ranks high. I decided to give it the SlideMagic treatment: how would the deck have looked when the slides would have been created in SlideMagic.

• I changed the slide design to fit SlideMagic
• I did not change the slide content
• I did not change the story flow

I have a few comments on the slides that I have put in the SlideMagic explanation boxes.

Here is the original:

The slide deck we used to raise half a million dollars from Buffer

Here is the same deck in SlideMagic. You can clone this presentation to your own SlideMagic account by clicking this link and use some of the slide concepts in your own presentations. I have also added this presentation as a template in SlideMagic's template library.

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Art: Johann Zoffany paints a group of Englishmen in Rome for the Grand Tour, united only by their wealth and love of art; unlike most conversation pieces, this was not a commissioned work

SlideMagic bugs fixed

Presentation software needs to be absolutely bug free. Unlike a social media mobile app, where you can wait with grazing your news feed for a few hours, the presentation app needs to be ready for that critical 20 minute slot for the all-or-nothing presentation.

That is the reason I am keeping SlideMagic still in beta as I iron out all possible glitches. Here are some we fixed recently. If one of these caused you to stop using the app, give it another try.

• Fixed: small (but annoying) differences in font size rendering between what you see in PDF and what you see on screen, causing words to drop to the next line when you don't want them to.
• Fixed: erratic font size behaviour when rapidly increasing or decreasing font sizes
• Fixed: enabling multi-edit of cells to manage colours, font sizes of more than one cell in one go.
• Fixed: no need to leave and re-enter the shape format menu to work on another cell
• Fixed: Windows/Firefox UI freezes
• Fixed: story mode drag and drop issues

SlideMagic is moving closer to production stability.

B.t.w, I updated the SlideMagic marketing site yesterday, making the positioning plain and simple: it is easy to make business presentations. Easy, that's it. Also made the images a bit more daring.

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Art: Scène d'été, or Summer Scene, is an oil on canvas painting by Frédéric Bazille, completed in 1869

SlideMagic example

Ramzi Mrad is entrepreneur in residence at INSEAD and used SlideMagic prepare his presentation of business case: how Roche Pharmaceuticals set the price for its Avastin cancer drug in Europe. This type of presentation is exactly how I envisioned SlideMagic being used. Without any professional support, a layman designer can come up with something pretty decent. You can see his presentation here.

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Art: Pierre-Denis Martin (1663–1742), Vue du Château de Fontainebleau (1718-1723)

Dumbing down

Seth Godin believes that:

• Dumbing down products will just attract what you asked for: dumb customers
• Removing features from software does not always make it better

I have been thinking about this a lot, since it applies to the core idea behind SlideMagic: making a simpler presentation design tool. Usually, Seth is right, and he urges people not to avoid the inevitable critical feedback.

So, I am a dumbing down PowerPoint? I do not think so. These are two different things:

1. Get people to adopt a different approach to presentation design
2. Get people to use a different tool, but continue to follow their current presentation design habits

I try to do 1, and the SlideMagic tool supports the approach.

• SlideMagic is a new corporate visual presentation language
• It always looks aesthetically pleasing
• 90% of your time can be spend on your idea, 10% on jotting it down at a computer

So I think I am "smarting down" business presentation design. But hey, maybe I am biased and do not see things as they really are... 

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Art: British war time propaganda poster