Example: COVID chain of infection

A slide came flying by on Twitter:

I might a quick remake of this slide in SlideMagic, in line with the SlideMagic philosophy: quick, clear, nothing too fancy (= time consuming) and added it to the SlideMagic template database since it could be a useful basis for any slide that needs to show some sort of chain of events.

What did I change?

• Removed the low-contrast red on black colours

• Took out the simplistic icons and replaced it with no-nonsense clear numbers

• Rounded up numbers so to avoid cut up people (audience is not hard core scientists)

• Put in a proper bar chart to show the magnitude of 416 vs 3, instead of an icon count

• Flipped the design left to right to make the flow in time more clear

This slide demonstrates how easy it is to line up bars of a data chart, arrows, and text cells of a table in the overall slide layout (an absolute pain on other presentation design software).

Work flow example

Yesterday’s “plumbing” post triggered me to show you an example of how you would quickly put a slide together to update the management team of your company when you are doing some plumbing. The work flow sequence below took less than a minute:

More plumbing...

An update.

A couple of days ago I released version 2.5 of SlideMagic with lots and lots of small updates that were sitting on the todo list. When designing, I cannot stand it when a small detail is off, and the same applies to software development. And like in design, most users/viewers won’t notice these individual details, but when taken together they add up to something. This slide does looks right for some reason, this app just works for some reason. Opening up SlideMagic should trigger an update to version 2.5.3 (writing this on November 11) after a few minutes, if not, you can visit the SlideMagic download site to install the latest version.

I am making changes to the positioning as well. That download or app landing page is now the home page of SlideMagic and no longer the web site that says that SlideMagic is a template bank, but also an app, and also a place where you can download entire presentations. All confusing, and still a left over of the SlideMagic template store on Shopify. The Shopify store is closed, and (that was quite a moment), the entire V1 version of the SlideMagic web app has been wiped from the server.

So the web site (still WIP) now reflects what SlideMagic is: presentation software with a uniquely clever user interface and a huge built-in template data base.

Photo by Bruce Warrington on Unsplash

How to make a source of change waterfall chart (Apple quarterly results)

In between the election news: waterfall charts….

Waterfall charts are a great tool to explain the difference between 2 scenarios. In SlideMagic, they are really easy to create. Below is one I put together quickly with data from Apple’s 2020 Q4 earnings result, and a photo I found using SlideMagic’s built-in Unsplash image search. Notice how I opted for an unusual vertical waterfall, to create more space for the axis labels.

Some people would argue that you could make the chart even clearer by breaking the axes: showing them as ‘5.6’ and ‘4.7’ for example. Yes, it would highlight the deltas better, but in general, I think manipulating axes, well, manipulates the message. The fact that the changes are relatively small to the total is part of the message.

I reshuffled the rows a bit to group the decreases and increases. That makes it more clear in one sense, but less clear in another. Your choice.

\How do you go about making such an analysis? I put my numbers in a Google Sheet that you can view yourself.

1. Enter the data for the 2 comparable quarters in 2 columns. Add the totals as calculations rather than hard-coded numbers to check that you did not make any typos. (The blue cells are the one that I type in, the white ones are calculations).

2. Create space between the 2 columns

3. Pull numbers from the input that you consider drivers. You see that I deviated a bit from the way the input was presented:

   1. Divided billions by thousands to make it more readable

   2. I use % gross margin rather than absolute COGS and profit numbers

   3. R&D: absolute number, SGA, % of sales

4. Recalculate the operating income with just these drivers (line 37), it is crucial that you get this right, double check with the input.

5. Now start varying your drivers one at a time, and recalculate the operating income in the scenario that just that one variable would have changed (see the green numbers in the spreadsheet).

6. Finally, check whether the component variations add up to the total variation you need to explain (in this case, I was lucky). If you are not, you need to allocate the non-explained differences to the factors somehow.

It is important to keep in mind that these spreadsheet figures are just spreadsheet figures. The change in product gross margin for example is probably not independent from the change in product mix (fewer phones, more laptops). Also there is a small rounding issue (the rounded vales do not add up to 14.8). I would solve that by chopping the biggest factor (-1.7 to -1.6). It is always distracting when small rounding errors create inconsistent numbers on your slide.

Users of SlideMagic can access the waterfall charts with a search for ‘apple’ in the desktop app.

"Please send us the slides 1 month in advance"

This tweet about a habit of conference organisers:

“Please send us your presentation a month in advance so our team can check it” 🤦🏻‍♂️

— Benedict Evans (@benedictevans) November 2, 2020

It does not make sense. Nobody prepares slides that long before a presentation, nobody reviews presentations 1 month in advance, and the request is probably not credible.

Why do conference organisers try?

• To spot potential content disasters early

• To spot potential time over-runs early

• To spot potential layout disasters early (bullet points…)

• To spot potential technical issues early (‘What, no Apple Keynote?”)

These are valid concerns and the solutions is possible somewhere in between.

• Rather than sending a broadcast request, do some research about your speakers, leaving the pros, and focus on possible weak links with coaching (and hassle)

• Ask for a draft of a “typical presentation” way in advance to get some sense of what is coming

• Set a very credible deadline 2-3 days for the event (“we are building the conference hard drive”)

And, if you are a speaker and do not have a story on the shelf (it is the story that matters, not the slides), it is probably a good idea to start getting your head around what you want to say a few weeks in advance. Slides can be made in a couple of hours (try using SlideMagic, it is really easy), crafting a compelling story takes a lot longer. Starting to think about it early means that your brain worries about it, even when you are not actively aware of it and things will fall in place later.

Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

Opt in/out for beta versions

I am pushing new updates to the SlideMagic desktop app almost every day. Most of the things I do at the moment are not spectacular new features, but improving the plumbing of the app. I have now created the option to opt in or out of these beta versions (that could have the occasional bug). Users on deadlines for important presentations do not have time to beta test software.

All users are by default opted out of beta versions. You can opt-in by accessing your user account on the SlideMagic web site and tick the appropriate box. Make sure you are logged in to your account in the SlideMagic desktop app as well for the automatic updates to work.

To switch back to stable updates only, untick the box in your user account, and go to the desktop app download page to install the latest regular version of the app.

It is pretty amazing that today’s software development tools enable this juggling of regular and beta versions in just a few lines of code. Soon, beta versions will move again from plumbing to a number of new features I have in mind. Stay tuned.

Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash

A strategy overview slide

Here is a slide from a recent Daimler strategy presentation:

The slide does not look bad, and is definitely an improvement of earlier versions of the same chart:

Still there is room for improvement:

• The big blue action verbs are highlighted, but these are not the key messages of each box. (Side note: yes it is the most correct way to write things starting with an action verb, but when space is limited, I tend to break this rule).

• The 16x9 wide screen format invites a horizontal layout, which in turn makes the resulting narrow boxes hard to read, and the layout looks a bit strange because of the line breaks resulting from longer words

• Wording can be reduced and improved further.

I quickly put something together in SlideMagic. It might look a bit less sophisticated than the heavily designed slide above (exactly in the spirit of SlideMagic), but I think it conveys the message better.

(Disclaimer: the above text is obviously mine and not the Daimler strategy)

I added this slide to the SlideMagic template database, search for ‘strategy’ in the desktop app or download it. (The thumbnail of the slide looks a bit different, as all slides show up in 4x3 format on a light background, you can change those settings instantly in the app).

Where did it save my file?

Producers of productivity software are changing the user interfaces of their software:

• To make things work with (their own preferred) cloud storage service instead of the computer file system

• To copy user friendly concepts from the world of consumer software to enterprise users. (What if Instagram would have used drop down menus?)

• To make it even better because they can (“duplicate” is so much clearer than “save as”)

On an app-by-app basis this might be a good decision. The new user interface is definitely better than the one that originated in the 1990s on one of the first releases of Windows.

But there is a problem for the enterprise user: all applications start to look different. Wonder what would happen if car manufacturers start switching around the pedals and other basic inputs of vehicles…

Also, the use settings of a consumer and enterprise application are different. Fixing the numbers or details in an annual report or contract is different from posting your latest story.

SlideMagic has a radically different user interface when it comes to designing slides, but the basic file management controls are pretty traditional.

Photo by Marten Newhall on Unsplash

Vague truths

It is a bad idea to bend the truth in investor communications. Alternative reality might get you the attention in the first deck screening (or that initial bump in the share price), but things will come crashing down if you cannot deliver on your “mortgage” towards the future. The value of your business gets reset to where it should be, but also, your own personal credibility just got a big blow, creating a negative impact for your current idea and everything you are planning to do in the rest of your career.

Sometimes the truth bending might not be intentional. A marketing person in a pharma company might say/believe that we have “phase 2 data”, when in fact the company has “phase 2 preliminary data”. It sounds the same, but makes a huge difference in how investors evaluate a pharma business. Pay attention to detail where it matters.

Try keeping your presentation honest without:

• Actually amplifying your weakness… There is a middle ground between hiding the truth and putting it on the cover page. In the latter scenario you will score a lot of points for honesty, but investors will doubt your ability to communicate with investors and clients

• Let lawyers take over your slide and fill it with disclaimers, it just becomes background noise (think of the Fortune 500 CFO reading the legal disclaimers while journalists walk into the auditorium for the analyst presentation).

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

Reminder: V1.0 shutdown October 31...

A reminder that we will be pulling the plug on SlideMagic 1.0 (long live 2.0!) on October 31. Over the next week you will still be able to download your presentations yourself from the old site, after that, you will need to contact support to ask someone to go down into the basement and find it for you in the archives.

Instructions for V1.0 download are here.

If you stopped using SlideMagic years ago because you did not (yet) like it that much, be sure to check out SlideMagic 2.0 which is in a totally different league. The desktop app can read your V1.0 presentations.

Photo by Tincho Franco on Unsplash

Four ways to write a story

My daughter is progressing through high school and is now asked more and more to write essays with her opinion. This got me to think about four levels of writing a story:

1. Without having a clear idea of the answer/plot, you start jotting down your thoughts with the main objective of reaching the total word count, and buzzword count targets. This gets you a fail on an exam, and you can also compare this to an unprepared presenter “winging it”.

2. You write a skeleton of the points you want to make, in the right order, with main headings and sub bullets, all in super short grammatically incorrect and incomplete language (because you are the only person who needs to understand it). This is probably what the high school teacher is trying to reverse engineer from the full essay when grading it: did she make the right points.

3. The skeleton, but now expanded into proper language. It makes the point, it is logical and organised, it is grammatically correct, but also, it is pretty boring. This would be a typical exam submission of a student, or a management consulting report

4. A convincing story, that abandons some of the logical rigour of the previous level and replaces it with an interesting flow, with some tension that resolves to the conclusion. As opposed to “winging it”, this is a story that a skilled salesperson can pull off on the fly without any slides or skeletons. Very few business documents or high school essays make it to this level.

Photo by Road Trip with Raj on Unsplash

Rounded edges

In the latest version of SlideMagic, all boxes now have slightly rounded edges. You actually need to look carefully to see it, but the impact on the overall slide layout is dramatic, things look more friendly.

Apple is a big believer in round edges in its designs. It claims that sharp edges do not appear in nature and are not natural shapes. (Well there are crystals). But I think Apple is overdoing it. The camera unit on the back of an iPhone for example has too large of a corner radius, and in many of the app screen designs the corner radius of the window, hardware, and icons clash.

In PowerPoint and Keynote the default setting for a corner radius is also too big, and there is no way to adjust them precisely to the same value (you can only drag with a mouse).

The edges in the SlideMagic PowerPoint conversions stay sharp for the moment, I can programmatically tweak regular shapes in PowerPoint (so no more mouse dragging), however for images I still have an issue.

The latest version of SlideMagic is 2.4.45 and you can download it here for free (Windows and Mac).

Photo by Eddy on Unsplash

A more precise image zooming engine

I just released a new version of the SlideMagic desktop app with an important update: a more precise engine for panning and zooming images. It was a very big update (a completely new image rendering engine) and to most users, there will hardly be any visible difference to the app.

But more advanced users will notice how image fills and fits now exactly, exactly fill the shape boxes, and how to (much bigger) image zoom slider is much more precise.

(For those interested: the old image rendering engine was still based on CSS background images with their obscure placement interface, a left over from the web-centric architecture of SlideMagic v1.0)

Photo by Pedro Monteiro on Unsplash

Convincing the center

The pattern repeats in demonstrations and political debates:

• The other side is clueless

• Everything the other side does , does not make sense

• We are right, they are wrong (always)

• Etc.

You will never convince people who are deeply attached to their beliefs. The people who can swing the majority are in the center. Questioning the intelligence and making fun of the people just across the line of the center (and their friends) is not going to make it easier for them to switch.

Preaching to the converted with a megaphone won’t help. Listening to, understanding, and engaging with the doubters possibly could.

This is true for political debates, but also for sales and investor pitches.

Photo by Chris Slupski on Unsplash

Log scales?

With all the talk about exponential growth of the virus, logarithmic scales are popping up in graphs everywhere.

What is a logarithmic scale? Unlike those on a linear scale, the units on a logarithmic scale change. See the chart below.

The result is that the normally speaking rapidly growing line 10^x now appears as a simple straight line.

Exponential functions can be hard to graph, analyse and compare. Toning down the scale makes things more manageable. I remember in high school, I used log mm paper to plot graphs from physics or chemistry experiments. By measuring the incline of the line, I could estimate exponential coefficients, and compare them.

While logarithmic scales are a great practical tool for scientists, I think they are less useful in presentations to a more general audience. “Look at this straight line, but in order to understand how fast tings are really growing, look at the small numbers that reveal the axis measurements”. People simply don’t grasp the concept of a logarithmic scale. If the virus grows exponentially, well, show an exponential line.

If you need to compare exponential growth, make a bar chart of the growth rates, rather than drawing straight lines on logarithmic scales.

Tutorials are ready

I completed the first version of the SlideMagic tutorial, describing the basics of how to get started, and uncovering some hidden features such as keyboard shortcuts for advanced users. The latest version of the desktop app is now also linking to these pages. Let me know if I missed anything.:

Tutorial page 1 - The basics

• Installing the software

• The top menu modes: edit, story, play, account, settings

• Adding slides and searching templates

• Formatting text, colours

• Adding images

Tutorial page 2 - Advanced

• Branding: your own colour and logo

• Changing the slide aspect ratio

• Export to PowerPoint and PDF

• Images and colours in the slide background

• Shapes: boxes, arrows, data charts

• Presenter view and speaker notes

• Keyboard shortcuts

• Installing updates

Tutorial page 3 - Data charts

• Adding columns and bars to data charts

• Formatting data charts

• Making waterfall charts

Starting to work on tutorials

Now that SlideMagic 2.0 is nearing completion I have turned my mind to putting together tutorials. For the moment, I am keeping it short and to the point, you can follow my work here: www.slidemagic.com/tutorial. This is all still work in progress.

Bullet point alert

Bullet point slides are a no-go, they are boring, hard to understand, and look ugly and SlideMagic tries to discourage you from making them.

Still, SlideMagic is not dogmatic and recognises that there will now and then be an occasion where you need to put 3 things on a slide (agenda items, next year’s strategic priorities, the fact that your product is faster, cheaper, and lighter). In the SlideMagic desktop app search for “list” and you are presented with lots and lots of list-style templates (yes, bullet point slide templates).

But in these templates, each list entry is a new shape, a new row, to make the slide visually more appealing. And SlideMagic’s grid engine makes it super easy to add and delete rows. If the message of your slide is “we need to do 3 things”, one of these templates will do the job perfectly to communicate that.

Often though, bullet points creep in when you are not really designing a list-type slide. “Ah, where do I put these points as well?” The points are not important enough (are they?) to merit a new slide, or drastic surgery to the layout of the slide. You end up adding a few quick dashes to a text box.

The moment you have to resort to this emergency bullet point solution, it should trigger an alarm bell. If it looks like I should change the fundamental slide layout, or even create a new slide, maybe you should…

Spell checker

I added a spell checker to V2.4.40 of SlideMagic. Incorrectly spelled words get a little underlining, right clicking gives you access to some spelling suggestions, and the option to add a correctly spelled word to the library.

This feature was high on the list of priorities of my daughter, who is using SlideMagic a lot for school projects.

Photo by Edurne Chopeitia on Unsplash

Architecture diagrams

I am starting to experiment with different chart types in SlideMagic. One experiment: IT architectures that consist of users, servers, databases, clouds and lots of lines.

The built-in icon search, combined with the new line drawing feature does a pretty good job actually. And while SlideMagic is not a dedicated tool to design network architectures, it might actually force you to make better architecture diagrams in presentations. Let me explain.

Detailed network diagrams have the same problem as detailed spreadsheets when it comes to presentations. They are project work tools to run analysis and plan work, they are not tools for communication. When I need to make a data chart, I always disconnect from the spreadsheet and resist the temptation to copy-paste. Instead, I pick the 10 numbers that matter, round them up to the relevant precision, and plop them in a very simple bar/column chart that tells the story.

The same is true for IT architectures. If you want to present an architecture overview on a slide, that slide needs to be understood almost immediately when putting it up (like all slides in your deck). If tangled connections, boxes, servers make that hard, then the only thing your slide communicates is that your architecture is complex, not much more.

Again, disconnect from the working papers. Think about your message: ‘my architecture has 3 layers’, ‘my system connects the systems of 15 suppliers’, ‘my system is entirely on premise’, whatever that message is, make a simple chart that supports it.

Remember, presentation slides are usually not project briefings for network installers.