One image, different compositions

I am uploading lots of slides now to SlideMagic everyday. Where possible, I create multiple layouts of slides, often depending on the underlying image I use. For example, see the juggler below.

There are lots of degrees of freedom:

• Image in a frame, or bleeding of the the page

• Line up text with the balls, or not

• Different colour options

As a SlideMagic user, you can pick one of these basic layouts and add or subtract boxes easily without messing up the overall of the slide.

Try it out for yourself, the search for juggler slides is here. For the moment, I have made access to the entire slide database from within the desktop app free, so you can experiment with presentations in .magic format. PowerPoint conversion and/or downloads require a pro subscription.

V2.2.9

A new version of the SlideMagic app is now available for download with very detailed improvements to how the app responds to clicks. These are not earth shattering new features, but are incredibly important to make the app workflow even better. You can visit the download link to force a new install, otherwise, your app should update in the background.

UPDATE: Make that 2.3.0, now with direct full access to the entire slide database from within the app. (PowerPoint conversion and downloads require a pro subscriptions)

Photo by Harpal Singh on Unsplash

Startup Board update deck

You can now access entire slide decks (“stories”) from the home page of SlideMagic. A few days ago I added a slide deck template for a startup Board update. As I upload the new slide decks, individual slides will get added with the right tags to the slide database as well so they will pop up when you search for relevant layouts.

More slide decks to follow. Let me know if you have any special requests.

Squeeze

Here is a sign that says “elevator 6” down in the parking lot of the building I live in. The designer took the functional approach: squeezing the words “elevator”, “6”, and an icon for an elevator and an arrow all in one line. That resulting graphic had an aspect ratio that did not match the sign. Solution: stretching and distorting the text so that now, it does fit all the available space.

Other solutions:

• Use a sign with a longer aspect ratio

• Leave white space above and below the text

• Leave out information that is not required: the word “elevator” is not needed when you put a logo, the arrow does not add much if the sign is straight next to it.

Why does Merkel's explanation work?

Why does Merkel’s explanation of the virus “R0” (basic reproduction number) work so well?

This is how Angela Merkel explained the effect of a higher #covid19 infection rate on the country's health system.

This part of today's press conf was great, so I just added English subtitels for all non-German speakers. #flattenthecurve pic.twitter.com/VzBLdh16kR

— Benjamin Alvarez (@BenjAlvarez1) April 15, 2020

She makes abstract mathematical concepts very tangible. Instead of talking about R0 being 1.0 or 1.2 and the resulting number of patients, she explains:

• If that ratio is 1, it means that every patient infects one other, hospitals are full in October

• If that ratio is 1.2, it means that out of 5 patients, 4 infect another one each, and one infects another 2, we are out of beds in July

No graphs needed.

Corporate earnings call deck

I am in the process of adding more full slide decks to SlideMagic. Now all the investment in automation starts to pay off. Creating slides is incredibly fast in the app, after that the server takes over and creates thumb nails, organises tags, uploads both individual slides as well as the full deck for download, in powerpoint 4x3, 16x9, and of course .magic format.

Today, I added a possible layout for a big corporate quarterly earnings call deck, loosely based on a recent earnings presentation of a large pharmaceutical company (these presentations are obviously in the public domain).

SlideMagic subscribers can download the earnings call presentation template here.

Let me know what other type of slide decks you are looking for.

The asterisk

I am preparing a few more stories to add to SlideMagic, one of which will be a sanitised box-standard quarterly earnings presentation template for a typical manufacturing company. Just stumbling on this tracker page. It probably started out good, but then the legal department got involved and put in all the disclaimers… “36 consecutive years of growth” sounds a bit better… I would have put that in the slide, and then clarified the “adjusted earnings” part all in the foot note.

36 consecutive years of adjusted operational earnings growth*

Testing the first SlideMagic stories

I reshuffled the code on the server, so I can now stitch entire decks (I call them “stories”) together that you can download in one go. I think these stories can complement the offering of individual slides.

• Slide templates are focussed on one particular design or image that cover a certain topic

• Story templates are all about well, the story. I expect them to contain mainly very simple slide layouts, what matters is what is written in them, and in what sequence they are put together.

I am starting with a quick make-over of the YCombinator seed deck, you can download it for free here. See the original post on YC for the background.

It is available both as a .pptx and a .magic file, but it with these simple slide layouts where the power of SlideMagic comes in: quickly adding or deleting rows without messing up your slide layout. You know which I would pick :-)

There is still work to do, you can’t get to the stories easily from the top slide menu. Also, the user interface can be confusing now when as a user you are not sure whether you are browsing slides or stories. Also, in-app story downloads are not your implemented . Work in progress.

Pop out of the box

The NYT used this pop out technique as a data visualisation tool on the front page. The NY virus casualties literally spike outside the graph, even over the newspaper’s logo.

Similar to a graph about unemployment benefits from last week. You could use something like this in your presentations as well.

I have a few slides on SlideMagic (example here) that use this pop out effect. They are PowerPoint-only though, since the style police of the SlideMagic app protects you against yourself breaking the rules of good graphics design. In 99% of the cases, that is a good thing, this is an example of the other 1%.

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

The side track trap

Now that I am teaching my kids how to code with the help of online courses I can see where instructors take the wrong turn. By now, I mastered the material myself, and can put myself in the position of someone who is trying to understand it (I was there myself a year ago).

One mistake is a side track trap. You introduce a completely new concept, but before explaining roughly what it is about, you introduce a few exceptions or unusual use cases where you could also apply this new concept, that the presenter has not fully introduced yet).

From a logic flow perspective, this could look great: we cover all the use cases together. From a teaching perspective, this is confusing. A reference video (‘How did that work again exactly?”), is different from a 101 introduction video.

I am not sure the instructor does this intentionally. Maybe videos get edited later and she needed to find a place to insert this specific concept, “plop”, this seems like the right spot.

Notice the difference between detail and side track. If you need to go into the details to explain something, a newbie can probably follow along as long as you stick to the one specific use case of pieces of information that reinforce each other. Leaving things at a high level (i.e., no details) but lots of different tangents can still be very confusing for the newbie.

This relates to the blog post earlier this week, where I discussed answering questions with the risk of tripping up your story line.

Photo by Jacob Meves on Unsplash

Best COVID-19 stats?

There seem to be almost more COVID-19 data charts than cases around the world at the moment. Cases or deaths, log or linear, increase or cumulative. The one I think is most useful is deaths per million on a log scale. It is impossible to get an accurate picture of cases, and you need to adjust for population sizes. This graph shows the current picture.

To see how badly countries have been hit, the absolute deaths per million inhabitants

To see the current state, the new daily deaths, per million inhabitants:

All data provided by Our World in Data

Credibility

YCombinator VC Paul Graham argues that the current pandemic has exposed politicians that talk confidently about things they do not understand: see the post her about credibility in corona times.

• He is right

• Most of these politicians probably did not knowingly lie, I assume they believed they understood things, that’s probably a key asset of being a politician

When it comes to pitching to investors, credibility is crucial, and you can only loose it once. Investors will have to work with you for a long time, they don’t have time to check everything you do, so as soon as one incident gets exposed where it appeared that they cannot trust you, that’s it.

So you get a question you do not know the answer to:

• If it is factual, give the answer after you consulted with someone who knows, maybe after a short delay

• If you truly don’t know, say so, with an approach how you mitigate the uncertainty.

Bluffing an answer is not the right thing to do here.

So as a startup CEO, you can still be highly confident that your idea is going to work, and keep credibility while admitting that you do not know everything, and that you might actually be wrong.

Photo by Dayne Topkin on Unsplash

Bullet points in the age of video calls

Most video calls at the moment are between small audiences that know each other, discussing internal issues of a company (i.e., not the global launch of the next iPhone).

Maybe a bullet point slide can work in these situations (yes, you hear this from someone who considers himself a presentation expert).

• They are quick to put together, especially now that your brilliant PowerPoint guru is not sitting next to you

• They make it easy to refer to an element in the chart when you cannot point at it. (Try doing this in a sophisticated management consulting framework)

• They fit in the current sober culture, where showing this really flashy presentation might leave people wondering whether all that effort and time could have been spent better elsewhere

But in a video call with insiders you can adjust your presentation style:

• Give everyone a few seconds to read through the text for themselves. (I.e. don’t read them out, the audience can read much faster than you can speak)

• Then verbally highlight what’s important (“As you see in point 2, we postponed the launch to September, and in point 5, I added Harry to the team”), then open up for discussion.

• Pay attention how you write the bullet points: long verbose points full of fluff wont’ work, super short summaries are too vague 

• Make those bullet points look decent: spread out over the page, readable font size, equally spaced out

Note the audience setting here, you won’t win that $10m RFP with a bunch of quickly slapped together bullet points. The audience does not know you, does not know the story, and here, showing that you made a lot of effort in itself will give you points, even on a video call.

<commercial>SlideMagic is the perfect tool for these type of slides, check out these slides with lists </commercial>

We will get to that on page 35...

Working from home means that I cannot help to overhear fragments of startups pitching to a VC (my wife is a partner in a healthcare venture capital fund).

You are in a Zoom call, going through a deck with a few people from the VC, and the senior management team of the company on the line. One of the impatient investors throws in a question on a crackling audio connection. Answer it, or (tell her to) wait for page 35?

If you were presenting to a huge crowd (webinar, live audience), then the answer is clear, tell them to wait for page 35, or even ask to leave all questions to the end.

The “intimate” Zoom call is similar to a conference room setting though that opens the door to more interaction that throws you of your planned story script. There is no general rule, but here is how I would handle the interruption.

• Always give some sort of very brief answer: ‘The short answer is “yes”, it has something to do with “this and that”, we will discuss it in more detail on page 35. This takes you as much time and disruption as saying: “sorry, page 35 will show up in 20 minutes”

• Then calibrate based on the sort if question. If it is a super naive question (junior analyst, VC who does not really understand the substance), maybe insist on continuing your story line so everything falls into place nicely. If it is a razor sharp question by someone who is really informed, pinpoints the exact weak point in your story, and/or addresses a big elephant in the room, you could assume that people have done their homework and know what they are talking about. Sticking to your script might not give you points here.

• If it is a big interruption of your original flow, have a way to continue the story in a slightly different order, bringing everything back together for the other people in the room

• If you get tripped up a lot by questions, maybe this is a sign that your story flow might not fit that of your audience. The 101 sequential story is great for explaining things to the uninitiated, but will not work for impatient experts in the field.

Photo by Ussama Azam 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.

Now is the time to experiment

Everything gets thrown around at the moment. Everything is all of a sudden allowed. Laundry, pets, and kids in the background of video calls., no problem. Why not take the opportunity to change the way you present as well?

Sorry, I did not have a lot of time to prepare that 100-pager, but these 10 pages capture exactly what we should discuss today

And while you are at it, why not use SlideMagic as an alternative to PowerPoint now that everything is risk free? Hey, maybe some of the new habits will stick.

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.

Happy with the search engine

Over the past few days I have ironed out a lot of small issues with the template search engine. Most of them were behind the scenes, how I can classify, tag, and group slides in a world of duplicates, typos, plurals, and related keywords. I think things are really starting to work now. Now it is just a matter of continuing to add templates that are useful (i.e., not diluting search results for the sake of template volume). I am aiming for a Google-type improvement: the front page won’t change much, the usefulness of the search results will get better and better over time.

PS. That Unsplash image on the cover is really nice, I quickly added a template based on it on the template store, you can find it here.

Photo by Steven Lelham on Unsplash