How to clean up PowerPoint slides

I sometimes help out clients to clean up a very large presentation. Incorrect PowerPoint use, copying and pasting of different slide masters, and a less trained eye for design/proportions create slide decks that look inconsistent and "not right".

I created the presentation design app SlideMagic in such a way, that these mistakes are hard to make. Here is the list of actions I typically go through when cleaning up big PowerPoint files. (And this is also the list of PowerPoint annoyances [well, most of them] you do not have to worry about anymore when using SlideMagic).

• Locate the client's super clean template file and use it as a start for the presentation
• Go in the slide master view and delete all master slides you do not need (I am usually just left with a title page and a regular slide)
• Create slide templates with the correct title positioning for 1) empty page, 2) picture in frame page, full page picture page, and separator slide
• Create drawing guides (left, right, top, bottom, not centre and middle)
• Set the the default text boxes, shapes, and lines (font, colours)
• Copy the monster presentation into this new master file
• Select all slides in the presentation and apply the standard template slide (title, not text) to it.
• Font replace all the incorrect fonts to the right font with one command
• For each slide:
  • Adjust the title text, so it fits in its frame, 2 lines maximum
  • Resize shapes that should have the same height and width
  • Make sure squares and circles have a 1:1 aspect ratio
  • Reset the aspect ratio of distorted images (if possible), otherwise do it by eye
  • Re-crop images
  • Increase/decrease font sizes, adjust text if necessary
  • Tone down the colours, make sure that things that need an accent colour, have one
  • Make sure everything fits in the slide frame
  • Realign and distribute the whole slide, centre/mid-align objects that need it
  • Take out gradients
  • Take out drop shadows
  • Take out outline lines around boxes/shapes
  • Round up numbers
  • Make sure numbers line up correctly vertically
  • Apply correct colours to data charts
  • Reformat tables (colours, text alignment, uniform row heights, column widths, font sizes, make sure they fit in the slide frame)

All this work is:

• Time consuming
• Not the result of an original presentation designer's fault, it is just hard to get the details right
• Probably obsolete as soon as more changes are made to the presentation

People should be spending time crafting their story, and not making basic typographical adjustments. Give SlideMagic a try!

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Image: Banksy, Street Cleaner, by Dan Brady on Flickr.

The right amount of information on a slide

This is the hardest thing in presentation design. Many people fill up a slide with far too much detail. But others write such high level, abstract concepts, that the slide says nothing at all. What is the best middle ground?

Let's declutter a busy slide. This is a mental exercise I usually go through

1. Cut out/cut through buzzwords and filler words 
2. Cut out side tangents
3. See how many points the slide wants to make. If it is just a sequential listing of independent story elements (i.e., the slide does not want to convey a relationship between them), we can them spread them out: each slide gets one point.
4. If the elements have some sort of relationship in them, it is usually one of 2 kinds: a contrast, or a ranking of pro/cons of different options, or a cause/effect story of multiple factors influencing each other leading to a conclusion
5. I try to draw the pro/con table or process flow diagram on a piece of paper so I understand what is actually going on. I draw multiple versions where I simplify things (combine rows/columns, swap rows/columns, boxes, arrows) until I get to a clean version of the message
6. Now I go in slide design mode:
   1. First slide is a generic one: "our solution is better because we managed to paint the object blue instead of yellow. Yes it might not sound like it, but this is a big deal, let me explain why"
   2. This is followed by a number of slides where I explain key sub points in more detail
   3. Now that I have warmed up the audience, I can show a stylised version of my paper napkin that brings the whole thing together.

In all of this, step 5 is the crucial one. One little sketch like this can be the foundation on which an entire presentation is built.

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Picture: live stock in Chicago, 1947

Seven years of blogging!

Who would have thought that I would still keep things up seven years later when I started out with this post. We went from Slides that Stick, to Sticky Slides, to Idea Transplant, and now to SlideMagic.

Many people ask me, how do you do this? Well, here is the secret: don't make it a big effort. Everyday, I usually take something from my client work, strip out the confidential parts, anonymise and share it with you. Not more than 10 minutes of work.

Hopefully this can inspire more of you to open up to the world.

Designing presentations for print

In some industry sectors, especially financial services, people still insist on printing the presentation slides and handing out booklets at the start of the meeting. You can have groups of 10-20 people sitting around a conference table flicking through pages.

It is great for taking notes, analysing detailed financials, but it is not that great for a close connection between speaker and audience, and that last minute typo in the name of the CEO cannot be corrected once on paper.

Sometimes you have to pick your battles and if print is the way to go, think about these issues when starting the design of your slides. The bottom line, get a slide to look good on paper on day 1 of the design project, not at 3AM the night before the meeting.

• Colours appear different on screen than on paper, especially on cheaper, older, or almost-out-of-toner printers. Bright blue can turn into faded grey, lively orange can become girly pink, subtle grey shadings turn into bright white, just to name a few potential problems.
• Hole punchers for binding machines require extra space at the top of your page, test it.
• Dark back grounds empty toner cartridges and make make the fingers of your audience black.
• You can get away with low res images on a 15 year old VGA overhead projector, on paper though, you will get caught. Use high resolution images.
• A monitor frame, or the light rectangle on a projection screen provide an implicit frame for your slide. Paper should do the same in theory, but A4/letter/4:3 and other issues makes it highly unpredictable how your slides are scaled on paper. In the worst case you might have draw a tiny grey line around your slides to anchor things (yes really).

Professional print designers will laugh at all this, this is design 101, and these issues have long been solved with Adobe InDesign, and printer driver software. A whole industry has been built around this, you are unlikely to see page scaling issues in your print newspaper. The problem is, these designs are hard to maintain/change in a corporate environment.

The one good thing about print though is that it shows that your slides are as fresh as the croissants in the bakery down stairs if the pages are still warm from the printer. A compliment I got many times in my previous life as a management consultant.

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Art: Vincent van Gogh, The Bakery in Noordstraat

Hopefully Microsoft reads this: small change to PPT 2016

I have been working with the PowerPoint 2016 preview for a while now, and overall my feedback is very positive (see my PowerPoint 2016 review here). 

There is one small thing that keeps me going back to PowerPoint 2011 though: the ability to customise the toolbar at the top of the screen. My set up has not really changed since this blog post from 2008. When working in PowerPoint I constantly need to access buttons that align/distribute/crop/flip and send objects to the back (and the drop shadow button to kill drop shadows). With my custom toolbar, I basically circumvented the majority of the PowerPoint user interface and created my own.

Hopefully Microsoft will include this feature in the final release of PowerPoint 2016.

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Image credit: Kate on Flickr

Principles come second

The logical flow for the presenter:

1. These are my principles
2. This is what I made based on them

The logical flow for the audience:

1. What did she make?
2. Why did she make it that way?

Don't sound like a professor who never gets to the point, even if you are a professor.

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Art: A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery, is a painting by Joseph Wright of Derby

Team introduction pages are not CVs

The team introduction page in a presentation is always a tricky one. Some much information (text) that can be shown, so many logos, so many pictures. How to make it all fit?

First of all, it is important to realise that team introduction slides do not equal CVs. They are not meant to provide the full background of someone's career, rather you want to present specific strong points of your team.

Things you can cut: personal interests, not every bio needs to cover every year of someone's career (unlike HR people that are always on the look out for holes), academic degrees if they are no longer that relevant (i.e., the person is older than 35). Job descriptions usually have very long titles (that makes them look more important). In your team slide, you need to do the opposite cut them down to save space.

Before you design your team introduction page, think about what it needs to say, and plan your design accordingly:

• We worked at big blue chip companies before: put the logos of the big blue chip companies on the page (and leave other logos out)
• We worked at the same companies: put the logos of these same companies multiple times on the slide (next to each team member's name), this repetition will drive the message home
• We did something really amazing at a company no one has ever heard of: leave the logos out, go for a more elaborate text description
• We have lots of experience with lots of companies: fill the page with logos, even if they are not that well-known
• We worked at an amazing company that no one outside country [x] knows: forget about the logo, add explanation about that company

Photos can liven up a team introduction slide a lot. The best picture is a group shot that is stretched across the entire page. On top of this image you can add selective bio information for each person in the picture. Next best option: head shots. Make sure they are consistent in style and cropping. 

Whereas in a live pitch, or in a cold email deck, people will not dig through a dense CV, later on, they might want to do so. It is always a good idea to add dense bio page(s) in the appendix of your presentation, preferably with hot links to your LinkedIn profile if possible.

PS. Team slides are often the most tricky slides in a deck to design from a technical perspective: it is pain to get all the head shots of people in exactly the same size, and exactly aligned. There is one group of people who does not have that problem: SlideMagic beta testers. SlideMagic forces you (sorry) to work in a strict grid, images are always perfectly aligned and cropped. Sign up as a SlideMagic beta tester now.

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Image: women's ice hockey team from 1921

Domino visualisation in a column chart

This visualisation is brilliant. I have never thought about using columns in a column chart as domino pieces. One to add to your repertoire of visual tricks and let's hoop that this doom's day scenario does not play out. 

The Greek Bluff In All Its Glory: Presenting The Grexit "Falling Dominoes" http://t.co/wLGBOp30Sn pic.twitter.com/JB9BSQ0Xfr

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 4, 2015

The press release is dead

TechCrunch blogger Mike Butcher wrote an interesting blog post about how to pitch to tech journalists/bloggers. It is well worth a read (below are his slides that convey a similar message from 2012).

How To Deal With Tech Media 2015 from Mike Butcher

Like VCs/investors, tech journalists are overloaded with inbound pitches. There are similarities in the way you should pitch them:

• Get straight to the point, cut the fluff/small talk
• Give more or less the full info the 1st time around, no "can I send you some more information"
• Be concise and clear what your project does and why it is great

There are differences though with investors:

• Exclusivity (breaking a story first) is really important to journalists, so blasting your news out to 100 people is not going to make it more attractive
• Journalists really want something to be news (dah), something that the world has never seen/heard before, investors are looking for the big returns, even if it is an old idea that is recycled
• Big $ fundraising is seen as validation by journalists, investors probably care less (at least the good ones who can spot a rough diamond before everyone else)
• Journalists might not have the in-depth technical knowledge as a highly specialised VC (an early stage medical device investor), and like to compare/contrast companies and technologies to the ones they know (competitors).
• He loves plain text and hates PDFs/attachments. This partial because of practical reasons (mobile devices, copying quotes), but also - I suspect - the journalists are actually used to digesting written/verbal communication and less used to digesting visual slides (hypothesis).
• The world of tech journalism is changing. In the early days TechCrunch used to be all about startup discovery, now there are increasingly other news sources that plays this role (Product Hunt for example). Mike says he is increasingly interested in deeper, background stories. So putting your pitch into the context of an overall trend that is happening might make it more interesting to publish.

Two lessons here. One: the wordy, fluffy, 1-pager/press release is not going to help you here. Two: pitching to journalists is different from pitching to investors.

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Art: Edouard Manet: Music in the Tuileries, 1862

A new on-boarding presentation

Recently, I have changed the first presentation that appears when people sign up for the beta version of my presentation design app SlideMagic. If you are an existing beta tester, you can still access it in the templates folder of SlideMagic, or you can clone the presentation by clicking this link. I hope it helps you get the most of SlideMagic:

• Importing and cloning template slides
• Working with the grid including images and data charts
• Formatting cells in one go, rather than one after the other

PowerPoint template weirdness

A technical post about PowerPoint templates today.

When you copy the slides of one PowerPoint presentation into another one, the copied slides get formatted according to the template of the presentation your are copying in. Colours and fonts get adjusted. But the most surprising things happen with text placeholders.

The template I typically use is pretty simple: a blank page with text placeholders for the slide title and footnote to make sure they are anchored in a consistent place across slides. Now the strange thing happens. Because the footnote is the only text placeholder available, PowerPoint starts copying text into the footnote.

To accommodate clients who want to use my template after the presentation design project is over, I now add a plain text box to my template slides. Here is the key thing, make sure that plain text box is the first text place holder you create, that's where copied text will go. (In other words, remove the footnote, put the text box in, recreate the footnote place holder after that).

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If you often experience problems with inconsistent formatting of presentations and the issues with copying slides across you will appreciate the way I designed my presentation app SlideMagic (sign up for the beta here).

• One slide layout grid for all presentations, everything lines up perfectly, always
• No need for template programming
• It is not possible to corrupt a template and having it slowly propagate throughout your company
• Changing the look & feel of a presentation is easy: change your logo and accent colour and you are done (including bar and column charts, try that in PowerPoint)

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Art: The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, 1633. The painting is still missing after the robbery from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990.

But that image does not exactly match?

Not every image that is used in advertising has a functional objective. Take fashion ads, for example, sometimes the product is missing all together. 

1. Images that show something highly specific: a product, a medical condition, a location
2. Images that show a relevant scene or background: people tapping on their mobile phone, a driver in a traffic jam, calm bamboo forest, a sunset
3. Images that make a visual metaphor: a prisoner in a cage, a cat chasing a mouse
4. Images that just set the mood of the presentation

I use 1. and 4. more, and 2. and 3. less because they often lead to visual cliches. 

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Art: "Self-Portrait, Yawning" by Joseph Ducreux, 1783

Cinematic colours

The films by Wes Anderson (The Royal Tennenbaums, The Grand Budapest Hotel among others) have a very distinct visual style. This blog highlights colour patterns of selected scenes. Nice inspiration for your presentation if you like light pastel colours.

http://wesandersonpalettes.tumblr.com/post/117849683385/concierge-and-how-long-will-you-be-staying-with

Mowing the grass

Presentations grow over time, stuff gets added over months, years, often by different users/designers.

• The company started with 2 products, and these 2 products - at the time - seemed like a natural way to structure the story. Now with 7 products that story gets a bit boring. Maybe we need a different presentation structure all together?
• In the beginning the company had 15 customers which we could nicely lay out on a page, now our 100+ customer list becomes a pain to maintain. Maybe we just show a map with countries where we have customers?
• When we just moved in, we were really proud of our office and that big picture showed it. Five years later, having an office is not something that merits a slide.
• In the beginning, the company was equal to its 2 founders. Now that 15-person team slide on page 3 seems a bit out of place.

When it is time to mow the lawn, do it.

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Art: Vincent van Gogh, Patch of Grass, 1887

Get straight to it

In big, multinational corporations, many projects follow this pattern:

1. Templates with extensive data request is sent out to all relevant business units weeks/months in advance
2. One week before the meeting the chasing for data starts
3. At the last minute, business units merge pages of filled out templates with existing presentation material (Frankensteining)
4. At the in-person gathering, each business unit representative goes through page, by page, by page, by bullet, by bullet. Everyone is physically, but not mentally presentation (doing email, walking in and out to take calls until...
5. ...only at the very end the hot issue that has been hanging in the room comes out and becomes the subject of a heated debate while time is running out.

You don't need the reading out aloud of data templates (people can read for themselves), but you do need a good structure to guide that heated group discussion. The time that people are together is better spent with identifying options and listing pros and cons.

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Art: Argument over a Card Game, by Jan Steen, 17th century

You are not the only one

If you are pitching a healthcare IT business to a healthcare IT investor, she has probably seen hundreds of pitches of healthcare IT companies. If you are pitching a mobile content service to a mobile operator, she has probably seen hundreds of pitches by other mobile content providers. If your pitching an IT solution to a RFP evaluation team, they are likely to have invited more (similar) companies to pitch.

• Check whether you need to invest time in presenting industry background. If you are number 50, others probably have covered that ground (no need to preach to the converted)
• Don't make up facts about the competition, the audience might have invited them before you and heard the actual information first hand
• Use most of the time in the meeting to emphasise how you are different from all the other ones.

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Art: Alfred Wierusz-Kowalski (1849–1915)  The lone Wolf

I am going to force feed my Executive Summary on you

People often ask me what an appropriate summary presentation is to send a head of the actual presentation, the dreaded "Executive Summary".

Executive summaries and web landing pages have similar objectives. Keep the user hooked long enough to transfer the idea/messages and get her to do something at the end (click "BUY", or reply to the email and set up a meeting).

In web design, people have learned a lot. Use lots of white space, attractive images, links with inviting text that scream "click me", cut out boring non-essential information and put that on pages for people who want to look for it.

The Executive Summary though is still in the 1990s:

• We expect tat our story is so boring that we need to drag the reader through it as long as we can
• The solution: cut the amount of pages (maximum 2), anyone can read just 2 pages right?
• Whoa, how do fit all this information on there: reduce font size
• We need a big bold vision statement upfront (1 paragraph at least), a big bold vision statement really encourages the reader to keep on reading. Maybe there will be more big bold statements on page 2? Good stuff!
• The it is important to link our idea to all the latest buzzwords, readers love to hear more of the things they read on the latest tech blogs. Even if it is vaguely related to your idea, put them all in there. Wow, this Executive Summary is all about these great trends? I have to read on!
• After rereading the Executive Summary, we find that it sort falls out of the blue. We need to tie it into the big things that are happening in society. Mobile phone penetration is huge right now. Social media is changing the way we consume content. (This is especially true for younger people). Gartner and IDC have some good stats and quotes on this, let's add them. The reader must think: I want to read more about this!
• The broader market (TAM) is just absolutely big. We are the only company in this space but the market will grow from $15b (2011 data) to $32.67b in 2014. This size market? These guys have discovered something that I completely missed, must read on.
• Our technology is absolutely amazing. Let's start with the bottom architecture layer, and build it right up step by step. The "secret sauce" that makes us so scalable and flexible
•  We are 1.5 pages in, time to introduce the idea. 
• Oops, what about the team? Five bullets with CV summaries (don't forget the undergraduate degrees, and our hobbies).
• Squeeze the margins a bit, it just fits.
• Now copy paste selective paragraphs to put in the cover letter of the email.

This is clearly going to get someone excited (not). Think about your Executive Summary as a landing page that competes for the reader's attention. Make it visual. Make it presentation slides instead of text. Introduce what is you do early. Intrigue her on every page so she clicks through to the next one.

Force feeding Executive Summaries have not resulted in a lot of follow up meetings.

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Art: Eduardo Zamacois y Zabala (circa 1841-1871), Taming the Donkey, 1868

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.

Team slide, in the front or in the back?

Where to put the slide with the team? Early in the presentation, or towards the end? It depends.

• If your team is one of the main assets of your startup, well, put it up front.
• If the majority of your team is sitting physically in the presentation room, well, you might as well use the team slide upfront to introduce them
• In other cases, I gravitate towards putting the team slide in the back, after your pitch of the big idea of your venture.

The team slide in a live presentation is different from a detailed bio

• The presentation slide should emphasise what is remarkable about your team, and omit other details:
  • If your team worked at a lot of big, blue chip companies, splatter the slides with recognisable logos
  • If your team has a history of working together, show a time line with overlaps
  • If your team consists of brilliant scientists, show the awards they got
  • If your team has complementary skills, show the puzzle with all the pieces
• The detailed bio is important as well, for people to read/study after the meeting. This can be a dense font 10 page that goes in the appendix of your presentation. You can include links to LinkedIn profiles as well on this page.

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Art: Jacob Jordaens (1593–1678), The King Drinks

My iBook abour presentation design is now free

I now marked down the price of my iBook "Pitch It!" down to $0. The whole iBooks experience has been an interesting one. First I thought that publishing a book through Apple's platform would be like writing software: updates would automatically be pushed to all readers. The iBook format would also use all the interactive/touch features of the iPad.

Two and a half years later I must conclude that web design engines such as Squarespace have now become so powerful that they match iBook's interactive capabilities. I have ported my entire book here (it is free as well). It works great on iPad, but also on other tablet devices, mobile phones, desktop screens. The source code is also easier to maintain and update.

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Art: Degas, The Rehearsal, 1873