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No, online collaboration has not been solved yet

No, online collaboration has not been solved yet

SlideMagic is moving into the polishing phase, after which we can take off the invite-only beta sign up form the app. So far I have mainly focused on the slide design engine. Sloppy design is one big problem of modern business communication.

The other one is collaboration, version management, and sharing, which I am starting to think about more and more now. Email attachments are big. You are always looking for slides in old presentations. You can never keep track on how has access to your files in Dropbox. You are never sure that when you delete a file because of space constraints somewhere, it will also be deleted somewhere else. "Did I just share that file with the entire internet?" Where is that file in iCloud? Who remembers shared Lotus Notes databases from the 1990s? Mass multi-editor collaboration creates to the too-many-captains-on-ship problem.  Companies find it impossible to maintain clean slide templates, or up to date versions of slides. Full project management environments feel like corporate prisons where every action/edit has to go through an application.

There must be a smarter, much simpler, way to do this.


Art: Henri Matisse, Dance, 1910

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Speaker versus explanation notes on SlideMagic

Speaker versus explanation notes on SlideMagic

SlideMagic now has 2 types of notes for each slide:

  • Explanation notes can be added to the right of the slide (optionally) and are meant for explaining the content of the visual is nice fluid full sentences. In case the presenter cannot be there to explain things in person. They are nicely formatted.
  • Speaker notes are messy, huge bullets that serve as a reminder for the speaker during a live presentation. The bullets are visible to the speaker on the presenter window (not to the audience).



Art: George Jakobides, Two children playing peekaboo, 1895

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Useful presentation design tools and resources

Useful presentation design tools and resources

As most of my clients outside Israel are enjoying the X-mas break, I have some time to clean up my web site further (no holiday here in Tel Aviv). I added a bunch of presentation design resources on the site.

  • Presentation design books. The flurry of new presentation design book releases seems to have faded a bit over the past years. Has all that needs to be said, been said, or did I miss anything?
  • Presentation design tools. A few neat software tools that can make the life of a presentation designer easier.
  • Sources of presentation images. There are more and more sites out there that offer free stock images under a creative commons license. These images are free, look real, BUT the library sizes are still small, and search is limited.
  • The blog search archive. Now that I moved away from Blogger, it is harder to add sidebars with search boxes, archive links, and tag clouds to the blog. Hence, the dedicated search page for access to 6.5 years of posts (more than 1700 in December 2014).

I hope you find it useful, and let me know suggestions to add more resources.


SlideMagic: a platform for magical presentations. Free student plan available. LEARN MORE
Lawyers, politicians, doctors, priests, and corporate executives...

Lawyers, politicians, doctors, priests, and corporate executives...

...They all have their own traditional language. Complicated contracts, evasive and woolly statements, illegible prescriptions, religious books only written in Latin, and bullet point-filled PowerPoint presentations full of jargon and buzzwords. These languages were formed by tradition, and some may argue are here to protect a profession (who needs a lawyer when you can seal agreements with a simple paragraph?). 

And yes, I put business presentations in the same category. Change is already happening. Formal letters are replaced by short, informal emails. The woolly Microsoft Word long hand memo was replaced by PowerPoint bullets. And for very important presentations (1% of the total?), businesses start investing in visual, custom designed, presentations (the work I do under the Idea Transplant name)

But change can go further.  The other 99% of business presentations can be different as well. These documents do not have to be graphically stunning, loaded with the latest animation and zooming effects, or full of exciting video clips. They need to look good, and they need to have a clear, crisp, direct, visual language.

It requires a change in the corporate language that corporate executives are using. And making that change is hard. Requiring a new complicated piece of software for it would kill the change before it even starts. The idea behind my presentation design app SlideMagic is to stop comparing business language to that used by lawyers, politicians, doctors, and priests...

Art: Benjamin Ferrers, The Court of Chancery during the reign of George I, circa 1725

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Let's eradicate PowerPoint 2003

PowerPoint 2003 still uses the old MS Graph chart engine, and while PowerPoint 2003 probably does not run on any computer anymore, the slides created with it continue to live on. In many corporates, the same slides keep on getting updated with new numbers, sometimes for more than 10 years in a row.

So, in today's PPTX files we still see leftovers of MS Graph charts, almost like virus infections. Depending on the computer and software you are running, some of the following can happen:

  • Random resizing of charts
  • Random re-coloring of charts
  • But worst: a total crash of PowerPoint and loss of data

Here is the instinct I developed and I encourage you to do the same upon noticing an MS Graph chart:

  1. Hit save in PowerPoint
  2. Copy the slide with the virus
  3. (Shivrrrrr), right click and open the MS Graph in the duplicate
  4. Go to the data tab and copy the data in a blank excel sheet
  5. Hit save in PowerPoint
  6. (Pfffew) recreate the chart from scratch
  7. Hit save in PowerPoint
  8. Delete the MS Graph slides
  9. Hit save in PowerPoint

With a bit of help from all of you, PPT 2003/MS Graph charts should be eradicated in 5 years or so.

SlideMagic: a platform for magical presentations. Free student plan available. LEARN MORE