Microsoft VBA versus Applescript

I am dusting of my coding skills that were pretty much put on hold in the early 1990s and have started to program macros to automate the mechanics of the template store: creating individual slides and thumbnails for PowerPoint and Keynote in different aspect ratios of these design.

Things in the Microsoft Office ecosystem run smoothly ("VBA"), for Mac, a lot less so. Applescript is a language that aims to automate pretty much everything you can do in Mac OS. It has been around for a very long time, but it is falling short.

At first sight, the language looks very friendly, almost human-like. And here is a problem: human language is ambiguous. It is incredibly hard to use it to program computers. When I look at example Applescript code, it looks very easy to adjust and re-use, but it is an incredibly pain to get it actually working and iron out the last bugs. Writing macro scripts will never be something that the average Apple user will do, so you might as well stick to a programming language that an engineer can work with.

The second problem is the what Applescript can actually do. As Apple put development of Mac OS on the back burner and gave priority to its iOS devices, the functional power of Applescript has been watered down. Old tutorials online show functionality that has been removed in later versions of Keynote.

Now, I am not saying that all esoteric features should be supported in a scripting language, but I am struggling to get the most obvious and basic one that anyone wants to use a Keynote script for: batch conversion of PowerPoint files into Keynote.

I am not giving up, and will look for a solution. Let me know if you have any recent experience with Applescript and Keynote.

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Cover image by Boris Stefanik on Unsplash

How to combat PowerPoint template "rot"

Most presentation drafts I receive from clients are a soup of different slide templates, with colours, fonts, and styles all mixed up. To clean things up takes so much time that in most cases, making a slide from scratch is faster.

The combination of PowerPoint's architecture (going back to the 1990s) and large groups of people collaborating on documents is the toxic cocktail that causes all of this. My app and my template store are my first attempts to put an end to this.

In the absence of a permanent solution, here is what you can do to vaccinate yourself against the worst cases:

• Ask some one marketing communication to email you the original clean template, and see how it works. Likely, it does not. Delete master slides you do not need. 
• Create a rectangular shape that you like: correct colours, correct font. Make sure the bullet points align when you drop to the next line. Right click the shape, and set as default
• Repeat the same for a plain text box.
• Now, every presentation that you create, either starts with this blank master totally empty, or you copy someone else's presentation into this master.
• And share your clean template freely with anyone who is interested.

(Or, start with an empty SlideMagic template, download it here for free)

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Cover image by Pascal Kahle on Unsplash

The "deck for sending" becomes more important

You used to design a deck for presenting live, and then tweak it a bit to make it suitable for sending / reading in an email. More and more, I end up doing the opposite (at least for fund raising pitches). You create a deck that can be understood without a live presenter, and then make adjustments for an in-person pitch.

• Business communication gets more efficient in general: fewer, shorter meetings, informal communication
• People (think they) know how to read a fund raising pitch, in a sense their structures are very similar
• More and more pitches happen between fund raisers and investors in different locations (lots of pitches to Asian investors)

Your old enemy was the audience falling asleep, checking out by opening the smartphone, the new enemy is the mouse click (page down, or worse: "close"). Given this, it is as difficult to design a good deck meant for reading than it is to create a TEDTalk-style deck for stand up presentations. 

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Cover image by Kristina Tripkovic on Unsplash

Writing macros in PowerPoint

The last time I used macros in PowerPoint was probably back in the 1990s during my time as an analyst at McKinsey. Yesterday, I picked things up again where I left them of.

To my surprise, the record function is no longer available (at least on a Mac). This used to be my secret weapon: record something very roughly, analyse the automatically generated code, and re-write that in a better way. The fastest way to learn the macro language.

Now you have to go through the process of learning VBA via the MSDN website. For someone with a Computer Science degree (i.e., me), this is doable, but I am afraid, anyone else will get lost.

Macros are still very hard to make idiot proof. Giving non-technical users access to a neat button in their ribbon that does magic probably works 70%, but in 30% of the cases, it will either not work, or worse: do damage to their work.

I need macros to speed up my production time of slides for the template store. Highly repetitive work is the bottleneck: creating thumbnail images, creating the individual PowerPoint and Keynote slides, in different aspect ratios, and creating the product pages on the store.

I toyed briefly with the idea of outsourcing this to other designers, but after a few days of study, I might have found a way to automate the bulk of the work, which will save me a tremendous amount of time and reduce errors, and free up my hands to increase the speed at which I can add slides to the store dramatically.

Things look a bit trickier for Keynote, I am going to dive into Apple Script and see whether it can help me.

Stay tuned.

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Cover image by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Halving and doubling

This tweet made me scratch my head, it seems so counter intuitive:

Don’t compare percentage change on a linear scale; use a log scale instead. -50% (0.5×) is as big a change as +100% (2×). pic.twitter.com/EhjtTG0d2M

— Mike Bostock (@mbostock) May 2, 2018

If you create a little waterfall, you can see the effect better. In both cases, the delta is half the size of the bigger column.

Yes, using logarithmic scales would be the correct mathematically thing to do, but they are very hard for people other than mathematicians to get their head around. 

Read an earlier blog post about constructing waterfall charts in presentations. Cover image by Ross Findon on Unsplash

Survey results in PowerPoint

Survey data can be tricky to present. So much data, so many breakdowns, where to start? Here is my take.

First, let Excel make "dumb" data visualisations, simply use the automated tools of the spreadsheet to visualise the results somehow. Use this data to analyse / what is actually going on. While a chart for a live audience should be clear in 5 seconds, these charts are for you, and it might take you a couple of hours before you have figured out what the most important trends in the data are. When finished, all these charts go in an appendix of the document.

Now write down what the key messages of the survey are, and find the data that specifically support that message. One message per slide! Next, find the most appropriate data chart that can present that data. I often see people mix up columns (time series), pies (harder to read than stacked columns), and bar charts (rankings).

Below are 2 designs that can be useful for survey data that cut across different segments. The first is the classical approach: a series of column charts. The first one shows the entire population, the second and third give a breakdown for specific segments.

Here is a slightly unusual variation for this chart. I went back to table and duplicated the axis labels for each segment. This table highlights the order/ranking stronger than the value of the actual data point. To add more clarity, I colour-coded the ranked data for one sub segment (not the total!). This brings out the contrast between the segments better.

Click the images to find the slides on the template store. Subscribers can download the slides free of charge. Cover image by Goh Rhy Yan on Unsplash

Clear legends to save the audience time

The standard Excel/PowerPoint legends for data charts are hard to decipher:

• They are written in a small font
• They rely on colours that the reader needs to match up with the corresponding data series
• They are positioned away from the actual data

I usually switch off the legends and make them by hand. What I lose in automation, I gain in clarity. See in the example slide below:

• I put the legend in big text to the right of a column chart (the last year is usually the most relevant for the audience)
• Instead of color, I use the order of the legends to match them with the data. The color is received for highlighting a data series that is particularly important. This is easier on the eye, less clutter.

Click the image to see the column chart in the template store, subscribers can download it free of charge. Cover image by David Travis on Unsplash.

Flying through

With a bit of Photoshop editing you can create an effect of a PowerPoint shape flying through some loop. I uploaded a new slide to the template store that uses this effect. Over the arrow, I positioned a second layer of the image, but just with a piece of rope with its background isolated. The arrow expanding outside the frame of the image (yes, I look those), adds to the motion feel in the slide.

View fullsize

Click the image to find the slide on the template store, subscribers can download it free of charge.

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Cover image by Blake Wheeler on Unsplash

Looking into the future

I added a nice image background with binoculars to the template store. When looking for images in presentations, try to find ones that have a lot of white space and/or depth, pay attention where you place your text, taking into account the overall composition of the slide and the contrast of the letters with their background.

Click the image to be taken to it on the template store, subscribers can download it free of charge.

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Cover image by drmakete lab on Unsplash

Take the junior analyst to the CEO meeting?

Yesterday's meeting blog post made me think of an other topic: junior analysts (lots of them among my readers) and whether they should go to the meeting with the CEO or not.

During the early years of my McKinsey career, there were many, many occasions, where I did not get to go to meetings where my work would be presented, and it was explained to me that too many people in the room would harm the meeting dynamics. A valid point: sitting in a huge conference room full of consultants does not create the atmosphere for a candid discussion about strategy.

But there were other concerns my seniors might have had:

• The junior analyst might not be able to present the slides, not having the right "CEO language", going of on a tangent, explaining how he did the analysis, without the so what
• And even if we did not let the junior analyst present, he might come in with odd remarks that throws the discussion in the wrong direction, vent his uncomfortable feeling with the broad assumptions that were made in the analysis (that were actually justified), thereby undermining the credibility of the whole deck.

If you are just starting out as a consultant, it is worth your while thinking about the above. 

But there are advantages of taking a junior member to these meetings now and then (feel free to use the following with your seniors):

• Taking turns makes sure that the entire 15 people team does not sit in the room at once
• Analysts can actually learn a ton from these meetings that will make the whole team perform better:
  • You see how these analyses are actually used
  • You get to learn that CEO presentation skill that you can put to work even when presenting to more junior clients
  • You might come in handy when a very detailed question about the data comes up
  • You get credibility with your client team members
  • You will get a motivation boost
  • You will need less time briefing to follow up on next steps
  • (Junior analysts are always good at serving coffee, making copies when needed)

Good luck!

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Cover image by Valeria Zoncoll on Unsplash

Simply "walk out of a meeting"?

Elon Musk emailed some productivity suggestions for Tesla employees a few days ago:

[quote]

• Cancel large meetings or if you have to have them keep them "very short"
• Walk out of a meeting or end a phone call if it is failing to serve a useful purpose.
• Avoid acronyms or nonsense words. "We don't want people to have to memorise a glossary just to function at Tesla"
• Sidestep the "chain of command" to get the job done. Managers insisting on hierarchies will "soon find themselves working elsewhere"
• Ignore the rules if following them is obviously ridiculous.

[/quote]

Corporate management styles are changing. Emails become informal, memos turn into visual documents, more and more people know how to avoid boring bullet point presentations, and the attitude towards meetings changes as well.

It is easy to simply walk out of a meeting if you are the one paying everyone's salary at the end of the month. A junior analyst is not expected to stand up say "my presence is not serving a useful purpose, goodbye". Instead, these people would just mentally leave the meeting by glancing on their phones.

However, there is something you can do. Especially in smaller project teams, you could include and agree a walk-out policy in the kick off meeting of the work. In that case, your superiors might actually feel embarrassed when it is time to exercise that walk out option.

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Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash

On top of the world

I added another slide to the store that is border line PowerPoint cliche: man-standing-on-top-of-the-world-wondering-what-is-next. Click the image to be taken to the template store, subscribers can download the slide free of charge.

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Cover image by NASA

Traffic lights in PowerPoint

Now and then, I use the good old traffic light chart to present the progress in a project: who has given "the green light" and where things are still stuck. These icon-style shapes are easy to create in PowerPoint. I usually start with Googling a few example images/icons, then see what basic shapes are needed, to finish with the composition I like.

Click the image above to be taken to the traffic light slide in the store, subscribers can download it free of charge.

Digging yourself in a hole

I have to be cryptical not to give away the confidential details of a project I am working on, sorry.

Some opinions are universally agreed upon, no facts, backup, or convincing is needed. (Unless you want to disprove the common understanding). Still, many consultants cannot resist and launch an effort to quantify something that is blatantly obvious, but is extremely hard to quantify exactly.

In a legal case, this non-issue, all of a sudden turns into a major obstacle:

• Shaky assumptions can easily be attacked from left, right, and center, putting the credibility of your entire presentation at stake (what if all the other analysis was this "sloppy"?)
• Lots and lots of data takes time to present, and all of a sudden this issue which is either already agreed upon, or not important at all, is taken up 75% of the presentation time and discussion. The "after taste" of the meeting is the impression of expensive consultants that could not defend their numbers.

Always ask yourself: do I need to convince the convinced, how important is this issue, and when is the best time to bring it up (if at all)?

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Cover image by Vladimir Kramer on Unsplash

Two types of PowerPoint templates

The Internet is littered with PowerPoint templates that fall roughly in 2 categories, I would classify them as follows:

1. "Potpourri"-style
2. "Adobe InDesign"-style

Potpourri. These are the slide templates that have been around since the mid 1990s.

• Not very pretty: a very "PowerPoint" design with gradients, bevels, shadows that is often trying too hard
• Hard, if not impossible, to integrate with prescribed corporate template files
• Filled with cliche icons and stock photos 
• Sites offer "tens of thousands" of slides, but they are highly inconsistent across designers

Adobe Indesign. Recently, print/web designers have been branching out into the world of PowerPoint: creating very pretty designs that look a lot like the finished product that is created in Adobe InDesign. But there is a reason that InDesign-style presentations do not work very well for everyday business presentations:

• They tend to ignore the way PowerPoint works with template slides: instead "hard coding" text boxes, shapes, and images on a blank page. This is very hard to customise as a non-designer, and it is impossible to fit into a corporate PowerPoint layout
• They mostly are designed around paragraphs of text. Headlines are big and bold, but text is incredibly small. From a distance the grid of images and paragraph text looks pretty, but it is impossible to read.
• The compositions are dependent on exactly the amount of words, pictures, paragraphs that are presented in the template slide. Have more text, one more option, less text, and you have to redesign an entirely new grid layout.
• Custom fonts make porting the source files between devices hard (most people don't even bother and in no time the presentation will end up in Arial).
• The layouts are all about presenting lists, or blocks, there is no visual movement that is important in business presentations: cause-effect, pros and cons, trends, sequences. 

I am not linking to examples of the above categories since I do not want to single out individual template providers.

The SlideMagic app and template store try to create a corporate visual language that will not look as pretty as the "InDesign" slides, but has a good enough design. What I give away in terms of design, pays back big time in terms of practicality.

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Cover image via WikiPedia

Is TED becoming stale?

This tweet passed by recently:

pic.twitter.com/F86q9a57sM

— Paul Kedrosky (@pkedrosky) April 11, 2018

Yes, I agree that the excitement about attending the actual conference is not anymore what it used to be, and people are starting to make fun of giving a presentation TED style...

But, the main TED conference, the local TED sessions, and the online library have made a huge change about how people prepare and deliver presentations. And, maybe even more importantly, by showing what a good live presentation actually is, they might have changed the agenda of many corporate meetings. Rather than everyone politely sitting through hours and hours of slides that will never be TEDTalk (next year's budget for example), it might be better to just do a Q&A / discussion.

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Cover image by Gisela Giardino

Graduating as an analyst

I have a few very long standing clients, often going all the way back when I started my presentation design business. They are mostly very large corporations where I work for many departments. Inside these I have followed along very junior analysts which are now rising in the ranks of the company.

I have seen this scenario in multiple versions:

In the very early days, they would be the ones in the background, providing me the data analysis for a presentation design project that would cover a much wider area than they would be responsible for.

Then they would contact me on their own (outside these big projects) with little slide requests and we would find a way to work together on a very small budget. And step-by-step, this analyst would pick up slide design skills, basically establishing their own minimal slide library of designs they could always fall back to (see an earlier post about this). As a next step, they would become bolder in the way they structure their presentations, having the courage to cut words, add an image and even some humor here and there in their slides.

These people can now produce pretty decent slide decks, not master pieces of design, but effective documents that speak the language of top management, enabling them to leave the analyst/engineering pool and making the next step in their career. This ability to teach yourself these basic presentation skills has been a big factor I think why they are moving ahead.

And it is exactly these types of slides that you will find in the SlideMagic store: useful design that help you create an everyday business presentation quickly.

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Cover image by Ankush Minda on Unsplash

Pitch deck alternatives

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson describes 3 alternatives to the traditional pitch deck:

1. Short video
2. Short podcast interview
3. A well-written letter

They are all great suggestions, some observations:

• All these are substitutes for the "first shot" pitch deck, where the VC is absorbing your idea for the first time, as Fred says to find out: "if they are a fit with our thesis and of interest to me and my colleagues at USV" He will spend a few minutes max on these pitches. You still will need other, more elaborate materials in the next stages of due diligence.
• See how important information about you, the founder is: videos and podcasts give away a lot about you as a CEO, entrepreneur, people manager, Board Member
• All of the above are as hard to get right as a good traditional pitch deck (especially the letter is really tricky). Just recording a video in itself will not give you a better chance to succeed. Seeing the first 10 seconds of a poor video, or reading through the first bullet of a poor slide deck are equal turn offs.

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Cover image by Daniel McCullough on Unsplash

The point is that there are many points

Everyone knows (from experience) that bullet point charts full of text don't work. Still, now and then, I need to make a chart that is full of points, literally.

Why?

To make the point that there are tons and tons and tons of arguments in favour of something. The business, the abundance of points, IS the message of the chart.

How do I keep it readable?

Separate the chart that makes the point that there are lots of points from the slides that actually explain the points:

• Show the overview chart that lists all the points, but not as written out sentences. For example, you can use circles with short descriptors in them: "low cost", "quick", "beautiful". Resist the temptation to go into detail about each of the circles,
• Bring all (or a subset) of the arguments to the forefront with individual slides, here you can show your cost comparisons, speed comparisons, etc.
• After the supporting slides, bring back your original chart with a slightly different headline

Note that this is an exception. Most arguments can be nailed with 3-5 decisive points. Rarely, I encounter the logic that "Each of these points are 'mah', but if you add them all up, a compelling case arises". In that case, use the above approach.

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Cover image by averie woodard on Unsplash

Improve your English

I have been a follower of Clare Lynch on Twitter for a while, and recently started watching her quick videos with tips how to improve you English as well. They are worth watching! She takes a very pragmatic approach when it comes to business writing, giving us permission to break some of the rules we were taught back in high school in the interest of clear and concise writing.