Preserve image positioning when switching between 4x3 and 16x9

SlideMagic swaps instantly between traditional and widescreen aspect ratios. The slide content stays nicely in the slide frame, everything stays aligned and you can revert instantly.

Because SlideMagic does not distort aspect ratios of images (no stretching or squeezing), the positioning of an image changes slightly if you switch between a narrow and a wide screen layout. This can be annoying for images where positioning is a big deal (compare the lined up eye lines of a series of portrait images versus a long-distance shot of a mountain range). If you switch aspects 5 minutes before your meeting, your presentation is misaligned. (This is obviously still a lot better than PowerPoint where everything would stretch and move to unpredictable places when picking a different screen format)

Well, SlideMagic fixed this last hitch as well. I just released V2.3.17 (download SlideMagic here for both Windows and Mac) which now keeps 2 sets of image size and crop frames, one for each slide aspect ratio. You switch back and forth, so will the image positioning. Make sure to double check each image once in both aspect ratios, and the settings will be saved together with the presentation.

For future releases I am studying more advanced image analysis, where I could automatically recognise a face in an image for example, and lock in the position of the eyes (maybe the first true “AI” application in SlideMagic).

Dynamic slides generated on the fly

Version 2.3.16 of the SlideMagic presentation app went up last night (download it here for either Mac or Windows). The major new feature in this release is the dynamic generation of slides (at least, the first steps).

There are different types of template search queries entered on the SlideMagic server. People look for a specific framework (e.g., ‘BCG matrix’), a specific layout (‘3 bullet points’), but then there is a whole lot of more descriptive queries to are a better match for an image search site (‘house’ , ‘diabetes’). While I could populate the database with hand-made slides for each of these terms, it is more efficient to let technology do the work for you.

So at the moment, when the server gives up and returns a “no slides found” message, the user gets offered the option to run an image search instead with the same keywords. After picking an image, the SlideMagic app turns it into a framed slide with proper image credits that can form the basis for a new slide design. This slide is created on the fly, without the need to store templates on my server. So the number of slides that SlideMagic can produce now goes into the millions rather than hundreds.

The screen shots below give an overview of the flow as it stands at the moment:

Obviously a slide with a simple image is still pretty basic. I am looking into expanding this approach with colour matches, and more interestingly analysing images for white space, with suggested pre-population of text placeholders on the image.

All these slides can be converted to editable PowerPoint files with a simple click. At the moment, this feature is implement in the app, not yet on the web site.

Work in progress.

Do you need Excel training or model training?

This tweet caught my attention:

Looking to sign up a colleague for a course in Excel. She found many where you watch videos but I think it’s important to do exercises / complete work. Anybody have any recommendations?

— Mark Suster (@msuster) May 21, 2020

I spent a decade as a strategy consultant at McKinsey crunching spreadsheets, mostly company valuations. And all of those, I did with the very basic Excel functionality: simple calculations between 2 cells.

Like PowerPoint, Excel is packed with fancy features that actually distract form what you are really need to worry about: setting up a proper model. Complicated formulas collapsed in one cell create opportunities for bugs to sneak in. Also, when you need to expand or adjust your model, it is a lot easier when everything is neatly laid out in front of you. In all my models, I could understand the flow of calculation line by line.

The golden rule of analysis applied: “if it looks wrong, it is probably wrong”. (In the 1% of cases this is not true, you are probably on course to receiving a Nobel prize for a major new insight).

I did invest some time in finding a way to make my spreadsheets look good. Numbers rounded, cells aligned. If you are staring at something that looks scrappy, you will treat it as a scrappy back of the envelope.

The exception to all of this might be cases where you treat Excel as a database application. Setting that up properly will require some training.

Photo by Wonderlane on Unsplash

PowerPoint plug in update

An update on the development of the SlideMagic PowerPoint plugin. One of the main reasons my first submission to Microsoft was rejected is that the current version of the plugin does not run on PowerPoint 2013 and the Windows 7 operating system, largely because I pretty much ignored Internet Explorer as a browser option. Microsoft itself does not really support Windows 7 anymore. The other problem is that it is actually hard to debug a plugin for Office 2013, I tried actually buying a copy, but you cannot get it anymore… On top of that, it turns that you cannot run multiple versions of Office on one computer. The strange situation is now that in order to develop add-ins for the latest versions of Office, you actually need to do that on a super old machine. If there is anyone reading this who can help, please reach out.

But OK, challenge accepted. I will begin to ‘dumb down’ the server response to calls from within Office applications. I can test the rendering of the screens in Internet Explorer 11 (just installed it), and have to hope that rest works in Office 2013 without testing. Hopefully the second submission will get accepted.

The current version still works but requires some level of computers skills and courage to get it to work.

Image by Masaru Kamikura

Better image search UI

Version 2.3.5 of SlideMagic went up this morning. The interface for searching images from within the desktop application now looks a lot better in a grid layout that takes into account portrait or landscape aspect ratios of photos.

I will further improve the in-app image search soon, with a preview ability to test the image in your slide, and combining more than one image bank provider. A lot is changing in the world of online stock images at the moment, to the extend where I often find free images to be of better quality than paid ones.

Business presentations are different from ads or consumer graphics design projects: picking the right image and getting the credits right is what matters. More to come soon.

The image search API calls are still a beta feature with limits on the amount of searches per hour and/or the image resolution, as I need to make sure my (unusual desktop) app gets the back linking and credits done in agreement with the image bank provider.

One more feature was added: tool tips for the app icons after feedback from a user. Leave your mouse stationary for a second, and the app will suggest what you can do here. Most icons and actions are obvious, but while placing them, I realised that indeed a few things were hidden and/or unclear.

You can download the latest version of SlideMagic here.

Stories coming next

I am using the current quiet to beef up the usefulness of SlideMagic. Next up are stories, bundles of slides with a coherent story that stitches them all together: startup pitches, board updates, budget plans, CVs, strategy reviews, etc.

The slide decks are easy for me to create, I need to solve a technical and a design challenge:

• Technical: the whole SlideMagic architecture is based on individual slides, I need to start linking them together to stories.

• Design: I need to come up with an intuitive user interface to browse and select stories easily.

Work in progress.

Photo by Erik Brolin on Unsplash

Alpha testing: SlideMagic PowerPoint plugin

If you want, you can try out the SlideMagic plugin for PowerPoint. When installed, it opens a task pane on the rights side of your PowerPoint screen, you can log into SlideMagic, search for templates, which when downloaded appear in a new PowerPoint presentation. With a copy-paste or drag, you can add them to your presentation.

I am currently in the process of getting SlideMagic Ltd. approved as a Microsoft Partner to add it to the official Office app store. Microsoft is experiencing some capacity issues at the moment as the working-from-home-world is overloading its cloud servers.

To beta test the add-in in the mean time, you can do the following. This is a slightly advanced process, sorry.

• Download the slidemagic.xml file here

• On Mac follow these instructions (original on the Microsoft site). Copy the .xml file in this folder: /Users/<username>/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Powerpoint/Data/Documents/wef (if you cannot see the Library folder in your Finder, select the ‘go’ dropdown in the Finder, then press the OPTION key and it should appear. Restart PowerPoint and a new icon “Start SlideMagic” should appear.

• On Windows, the process looks a bit more tricky: see here.

• The easiest is actually the online version of Office (instructions). Open PowerPoint in your browser, select Insert, select Add-ins, click manage my Add-ins, then upload my Add-in to upload the slidemagic.xml file.

This is all still work in progress.

PowePoint plug-in mechanism works

A follow up on yesterday’s post: the basic mechanism of the PowerPoint plug in works. I can side load the app in a task panel, let users log in, you can search for templates, to add a slide to your presentation I can only open it as a new presentation with 1 slide at the moment, you have to copy the slide across to your own file.

It is fascinating to see all the stages this slide goes through (automated mostly):

• I design the slide in the SlideMagic app

• Upload them to the template server

• The server converts them to PowerPoint and create screenshots

• The server updates the tags

• PowerPoint connects to the server and loads the side panel

• User logs in, and searches

• PowerPoint loads the PPTX file from the SlideMagic server

As soon as you download the SlideMagic slides into PowerPoint you instantly see the strength of SlideMagic when it comes to adjusting templates. Try adding a row to the SWOT diagram, it is hard.

I am not expecting to unseat PowerPoint’s install base any time soon, and the optimal situation would be where both applications can work together nicely. A robust plug in can help users who are hesitant to make the full switch to SlideMagic (and included in these users are people that work for companies that have very tough security policies to run software from new vendors on corporate machines.)

The next step is to make the plugin robust and get it distributed properly in the Office app store. Work in progress

Working on a PowerPoint plug in

I am continuing to experiment with how people access the slides of SlideMagic. Currently I am building a side panel plug in for PowerPoint, where subscribers can log in and paste slides directly into a PowerPoint presentation.

Now that I have mastered both front end and back end development, the search mechanism and user interface is easy to create. The tricky bit will be the final step, when it comes to adding a downloaded slide into an existing presentation. Microsoft does not give PowerPoint a high priority when it comes to the Office Javascript API. Let’s see how it goes.

How to create a logo page in a presentation

Yes, I have been in this situation as well:

Tweet of the century. This was my life for 10 years. https://t.co/eayvuTK2MG

— Jon Thomas (@Its_JonT) March 4, 2020

Below is a short video that shows how SlideMagic makes creating logo pages in a presentation really easy. In the first example, I start from scratch with a completely blank page. Notice how logos get plopped in, and how everything lines up instantly in the grid, and how easy it is to add columns, text boxes without having to re-arrange and re-align the entire page. (I have added this slide as a free slide on the template store, you can find it here, stripped of the logos I used because I could not verify copyrights)

The alternative is to start with one of the built-in templates of SlideMagic, search for “logo” in the app and see what slides come up:

Now you can customise the page and swap the logos for the ones you need.

The exact same search available in the online template bank as well (try searching for logo), but users who are downloading the PowerPoint version directly from the web site miss out on the magic of SlideMagic when it comes to manipulating image grids.

My suggested strategy: tweak things in SlideMagic, and export at the very last moment to PowerPoint if you have to share things with your colleagues. You will save a lot of time making those nasty logo grids.

Better PDF conversion

I just released V2.2.3 of SlideMagic, with a big feature update: a new approach to exporting PDF. Until now, I created PDF files by having the program recreate a .magic slide in .pdf, element by element, picture by picture, letter by letter. This got me to 99% accuracy, the 1% being cases where small mistakes would be introduced. For example, a word dropping to the next line because of tiny deviations in font size.

Unlike PowerPoint exports, PDF files are set in stone, you want to send that presentation to an investor, there is no way to fix a quick glitch.

So I changed the approach, the new PDF exporter takes a screen shot of the exact page you created and puts it in a high resolution PDF file. What you see is what you get, 100% of the time, by design. In the process, I could actually delete hundreds and hundreds of lines of code.

The app should upgrade itself in the background for existing users, or you can force the upgrade by downloading a new version from the site.

Other V2.2.3 improvements are mainly under the hood. For the geeks: the app has been upgraded from Electron 6 to 8, with a very recent version of Chrome, and both app and server now share the exact same code to render slides, images, and PowerPoint files, which will save me lot of time as I make improvements. I basically paid my duties for fixing “quick and dirty” copy-paste coding of a few months ago.

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Virtual backgrounds in video conferencing

Camera technology is finally good enough to solve the video conference background problem: no more bed rooms, bad lighting, plumbers, kids and/or other unpredictable events behind your back. In the settings tab of zoom, go to virtual backgrounds and set it to the mood you want.

Almost perfect, my hair and sweater pattern did get adjusted as well…

Closing the old template store, subscribers can move to the new one

The new platform now includes the entire collection of the slides of my old Shopify templates store (and much more of course). Yes, it might be costing me SEO rankings, but I am going to close it down: multiple platforms are confusing for users, and hard to manage. Also the old store was difficult to use for subscribers who had to go through some check out process every time they want to download a slide.

For each paying subscriber with an active subscription, I have created an account on the new platform with a Pro subscription that expires at the same time your subscription on the old store did. I don’t store your passwords, so you have to go to slidemagic.com (this site), go to the log in page, and hit “forgot password”. After entering the email address you used for the old store, you should receive a link where you can create a new password (invisible to me).

I will keep the slide download option running on the platform, because that is what people are used to when it comes to buying presentation-related things online, but selling templates is not the main point of SlideMagic. The pro subscription also unlocks the full feature set of the downloadable presentation app. Try using it:

• Super easy to customise templates

• A lot, lot more templates available

• PowerPoint export so your colleagues do not have to notice (of course you can tell them about the secret of SlideMagic).

If you are stuck email [email protected], and I am here to help.

Photo by Rhys Moult on Unsplash

Against the light

In the early 1990s at McKinsey, presentation design was actually document production. Hand-written sheets of paper would be entered into a computer by full time graphics designers. Each word, each line, each graph. Then the whole thing would be printed and bound in books.

I remember the final quality check of the Amsterdam office manager: holding the pages against a strong light to see whether the titles, footers, page numbers, and margins of the slides lined up. You were in trouble if they didn’t.

Getting these basics right is very hard in today’s PowerPoint, If you copy and paste slides between masters, the alignment of objects will be off. If you change screen sizes (from narrow to wide screen and back), things go all over the place. Or, if you use/buy other people’s templates, they won’t fit well in your company’s slide layout. This is not PowerPoint’s fault, any software that needs to give total design freedom to its users will have this side effect.

I went through this the hard way myself, as I am making the slides of my “old” template store compatible with the new format of SlideMagic 2.0. Hundreds of slides that require small corrections to get things to line up properly.

With SlideMagic, professional designers might complain about the lack of flexibility in layouts, the rest of us will be extremely happy with how easy it is to tweak templates, screen sizes, and copy slides between presentations.

Photo by Bank Phrom on Unsplash

Slidemagic 1.0 templates merged into 2.0

I am working hard to get rid of the Shopify template store with its shopping carts that are great for buying t-shirts, but not convenient for downloading presentation templates.

As a first step, I have now merged most of the slides of the Shopify store into the SlideMagic 2.0 database. Beta testers who go to the web site, see the templates alongside the new ones generated by the app without noticing the difference.

For 80% of the slides, I could easily convert them to .magic (the boxy ones). These slides appear in the template store with both a .magic and .ppt download option (the .ppt conversion is generated by my software, rather than the manual adjustments for screen size etc.). For the other 20%, I have uploaded the .ppt file without a .magic option. If you are just after .ppt downloads (hopefully you will change your mind at some time), you can use the template store without noticing the difference.

Users that access the slide database from within the SlideMagic app will not see the PowerPoint-only options.

So, hopefully I can retire the Shopify site soon, and I will migrate the subscribers to the new site. And, this exercise gave me some insights into what shapes I should add to SlideMagic, and what shapes are actually not required at all.

This is all a bit of a ramble by a product manager who is trying to justify and integrate past product decisions :-) What it means in practice:

• You signed up for the SlideMagic template store in the past: you can access the same templates, but also new ones

• You signed up for the new SlideMagic 2.0 app: you will have access to a great set of templates that are super easy to customise and don’t even miss the PowerPoint-only ones. (And, all your work can be converted to PowerPoint at the press of a button)

The SlideMagic 2.0 template database is now already a lot bigger than the 1.0 one. To be continued.

"Good with computers"

Being “good with computers” had different implications when it comes to presentation design over the years. From my experience as a management consultant:

• Pre 1995: professional graphics designers produced your slides, you could simply sketch ideas on a piece of paper. As a junior analyst you marvelled at how senior partners seem to be shaking new frameworks out of their pencil with zero effort

• 2000: if you demonstrated that you understood PowerPoint, you were instantly designated the entire team’s graphics designer, but only during out of office hours (18:00 to 09:00, and weekends)

• 2005: Everyone starts to produce their own charts, and being proficient in PowerPoint could actually give you an edge. Including images, even videos, complex data charts.

• Today: technical proficiency is no longer required, as more and more people understand that the best slides are really simple slides.

Photo by Museums Victoria on Unsplash

(Finally) free to really think

For the first time in months, I am spending more time designing slides than writing code as I am building up the template database. It is a great feeling to see all that hard work paying of now as I add one slide after another to the database at a very high speed.

This also puts me in a position to start thinking really what SlideMagic (maybe 3.0?) could do, now that I have a basic platform in place that can store/search templates, all listening to a uniform design layout. What if there are eventually thousands, and thousands of slides, keywords, concepts? Things can get interesting!

Yes, there is still the challenge of turning 2.0 into a proper company…

To be continued.

App update: V22

Earlier beta versions had a 2020 expiration date, I uploaded V22 to the server that should install automatically. This version also includes lots of performance improvements and bug fixes, including how the app responds to going back and forth in full screen mode, and right click context menus.

Photo by Jeremy Lapak on Unsplash

Expanding the template database

SlideMagic 2.0 has almost reached the point where I am happy with the features for a first release (icon and image search went in last week). Now it is time to focus attention again to what will make SlideMagic stand out: templates for presentations.

I have started to add slides with images to the template database, inspired by the slides that are for sale in the PowerPoint template store. This is also a good stress test to see how the app with big files full of images.

Work in progress, this will take a bit of time to get right.

Printing presentations in 2019

I don’t think many people are still printing presentations in 2019. The one exception: bankers pitching to institutional investors. The latter still like to flip along (or ahead) with the presentation and make notes in the margin.

Still, I want SlideMagic 2.0 to be fully rounded app, so I start the work on its print function. Printing is often ignored by many application development frameworks. The feature is not that important, it is tricky to develop and get right, but it has to be done.

A positive side effect is that I am coming up with a better way to convert presentations to PDF without the need to rely on open source libraries, and I can soon support conversions as a parallel process that no longer will block the main application process (something that can be annoying especially if you used large images).

(Beta testers can get around the current lack of the print feature by converting to PowerPoint or PDF and then print in those apps).

Photo by James Pond on Unsplash