Free student plan for SlideMagic

SlideMagic will be offered for free to students. I am working to set up a partnership with a student validation service to create a streamlined automated signup process. In the meantime readers of the blog can already apply for a free SlideMagic membership:

• Create a regular free SlideMagic account with your school/university email address

• Verify that email

• Visit this link to apply for a free subscription

This process is still partly manual, so response will not be instant. Student memberships will run until Aug 31, after which you need to apply for a new one.

Print bug fixed

For users who print their decks on physical paper, I patched a bug that was caused by the underlying software platform ‘Electron’. Everything should work now. Windows users might get a message that the developer SlideMagic is ‘unknown’. You can safely ignore that, I am working on getting rid of this warning. At your service.

SlideMagic 2.6.34

I pushed a new update of SlideMagic yesterday with security patches. The app should update itself automatically on your machines. Let me know if you encounter any issues.

Scaling of data charts in SlideMagic

In SlideMagic, you do not have to worry about picking the right scale for your data chart. The entire chart adjusts itself to the numbers you type in. See the example below:

To make sure that a consistent scale is used for your entire chart, you need to place all your data points in one shape, instead of using multiple shapes for example for each month.

P.S. I have added this monthly sales comparison chart to the SlideMagic slide library so you can easily use it in your own presentations as well. Search in the app for ‘sales’ and it will pop up.

Server move

I will be getting back to writing blog posts as we are slowly moving towards autumn.

Over the past weeks, I have been preparing a switch of cloud infrastructure provider for SlideMagic to Amazon AWS. The second (stealth) project I am working on requires a very high level of security that could not be delivered by the existing platform. It is amazing what infrastructures you can put together in 2021 at the click of a button.

I have just switched the SlideMagic backend over to the new servers (sweaty palms…) and everything seems to be working OK. I know that there many pioneer users among the readers of this blog, if you spot anything unusual happening, please reach out to me at jan at slidemagic dot com.

Leaving the math to your audience

It is raining COVID statistics in Israel as we are the first country in the world to deal with a post-vaccination outbreak. Below is one table that was released by the Ministry of Health (I found it here).

I have translated it in a quick SlideMagic chart (it always puts a big smile on my face to see how quickly this can be done).

But this data is horrendous to understand. Percent of what? What is 100%? The audience is left to do the math themselves. Compare the categories to the breakdown of the population, look at differences between 3 and 7 days ago, look at the ratio between mild to severe, etc. etc.

Using bars instead of numbers (another smile) makes things a bit clearer.

But in this case, it would have been clearer to release the data in absolute numbers and let people construct their own charts.

I have added the charts above to the SlideMagic library, search for COVID in the app and the slides will show up (see the search here).

Different levels in presentation templates

A “presentation template” is usually a PowerPoint file that new employees receive on their first they of work. There is more to a presentation template I think.

1. Your corporate visual communication style/culture

   • Consulting firms: lots of complicated diagrams and frameworks, meant for solving a problem rather than presenting

   • Investment banks: dense text and tables with graphs, meant for reading rather than presenting

   • Consumer goods company: product packaging shots and bullets

   • University: list of bullets

   • Etc. etc.

2. The actual software file that holds the basis layouts, logo, and colours (this is the one you get on the first day of your employment)

3. Running versions of important presentation documents that get constantly updated and tweaked

   • Sales presentations, each for a different lead or a different customer segment

   • Quarterly results presentations with - well - different quarterly results

   • Strategic planning presentations, each one for a different product group

   • Etc. etc.

Most of the day-to-day presentation work in companies is in step 3, the tweaking of existing documents to update it for the latest sales meeting or board meeting. These presentations are in fact the “templates”, not the empty file.

In most presentation design software the tweaking of an existing slide is tricky and over time a slide degrades after many iterations where users insert the wrong fonts, colours, and trip up a decent slide layout that worked for 5 boxes, but not for 6. (“Template rot”).

The above is true for both existing corporate presentations and shiny new templates purchased online. The latter look amazing fresh off the press, but it shows when a non-designer tried to fit it to her needs.

With SlideMagic we are trying to fix this. Make it easy to create decent looking presentations from scratch, but even more importantly, make it super easy to tweak this presentations, keeping everything aligned on an brand.

By fixing step 2 and 3, we hope to fix step 1 as well…

Your presentation "secret weapon"

We are doing some SlideMagic user interviews and the term “secret weapon” came up. One user, somewhere in a big office tower, is a lone user of SlideMagic and uses the build-in PowerPoint conversion to share slides with colleagues. People start to notice the difference in the slide the person produces.

Here are some situations where you can use SlideMagic as a secret weapon, a starting point for setting up the beginning of your presentation. Most of these slides are very time consuming to set up in PowerPoint or Keynote:

• A perfectly lined up, massive grid of logos (you finished the 10 x 4 grid, and now you need to move to 7 x 6 because you got 2 more logos)

• Data tables with bar charts that need to line up (oops, 12 rows instead of 10)

• 2x2, 3x3 matrices, other consulting style matrices

• A diagram with boxes that are connected with arrows

• A team chart where all the headshots need to have more or less the same size, with the “eye line” at the same height

Nobody needs to know / find out that you use SlideMagic, but we would not mind if you spread the secret…

Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash

Explained: vaccine 90% effective, vaccinated still expected to be 50% of infected

There is a lot of confusion here in vaccinated Tel Aviv, now that around 50% of people infected with COVID appear to be full vaccinated. Newspapers are heavily quoting the “64% i.s.o 90% for the Delta variant” which does not seem to be based on the correct calculation of vaccine effectiveness.

I used an explanation by Dvir Aran to make a slide that explains how it is expected that 50% of infected people are fully vaccinated, even with a 90% vaccine effectiveness.

The logic is as follows:

• Take 100 people who are seriously exposed to the virus

• Assume a 90% vaccination rate (the case for the at-risk population in Israel at the moment):

  • A small group is exposed: 10 people

  • A big group is protected 90 people

• Assume a 90% vaccine effectiveness:

  • 10 out of 10 unvaccinated people will get infected

  • 8 out of the 90 vaccinated people will get infected

• Of the total of 18 infected people, 8 will be fully vaccinated, so around 50/50

Of those 18, the majority of cases with symptoms and serious complications will be unvaccinated of course.

I have added this slide to the SlideMagic library, search for “COVID” and it will pop up, or download it here. Pro subscribers can convert this chart to PowerPoint, if you have to. (Students, you can claim a free membership!).

SlideMagic student program

We are working on new pricing plans, one of which is a free plan for students. Ahead of any formal announcements and websites, blog readers can already take advantage of this options. Email support at slidemagic dot com from your school/university email address (after you created a regular free account), and we will switch you on the new program for one academic year.

Photo by Good Free Photos on Unsplash

"Life by SlideMagic"

My amazing wife Anat Naschitz has always supported me in developing SlideMagic behind the scenes. Going forward, she will become more visible to the outside word. Recently, she created a deck to demo SlideMagic to a potential client. We have added these slides and the entire deck to the SlideMagic template database, so they all should be available in the SlideMagic app for you to use in your own presentation, simply search for “anat” and the slides will pop up.

New email updates should work now

Yesterday I moved over all email addresses that opted in to a new email update platform. You should have received your regular email updates, just with a slightly different look (the design still needs work). If not, you can re-subscribe here, or reach out to me directly.

Photo by Carol Jeng on Unsplash

Pondering SlideMagic 3.0

Over the past month or so I have been slightly ‘distracted’. My wife (a life science investor) and I are working on an exciting new business that can change the way the pharma industry works (and cure a lot of patients in the process).

It is amazing to see how quickly I can now put things together compared to when I started the work on SlideMagic 2.0. Product development and prototyping is now really fun, as you can try out different things, make 180 degree design changes overnight without the need to re-brief large development teams.

This new confidence, combined with taking a step back from everyday development on SlideMagic is sparking some ideas that could ultimately turn into SlideMagic 3.0. Unlike 2.0, ideas are no longer held back with my ability to implement them, which is an interesting freedom to experience.

The gradual SlideMagic development process might not be a textbook startup case, but I believe this tinkering is the only way to get to a credible alternative presentation design tool. I am convinced that it will get there slowly, and then suddenly.

Photo by Allec Gomes on Unsplash

Limited time...

This chart lays out the philosophy behind SlideMagic: spend more time pitching, less time editing. There are only a limited number of productive hours in a day, it is a waste to spend them on slide design…

• If you are preparing for an all-or-nothing pitch, you free up time to really, really rehearse your story.

• If that quarterly report is sitting on the top of the to-do list and preventing your from doing other things, get it out of the way quickly.

P.S. I have add this slide to the database here, or search for ‘slidemagic’ in the desktop app to use it in your own presentation

Updates to the settings

As of version 2.6.27, the way settings are stored in SlideMagic. I rely on open source software and the previous engine I used to save settings on your machine was not maintained very well by its developer and started to cause more and more bugs over time.

If you are a pro subscriber, please log in again after you update. Also, you might have to re-enter your accent color to store it on your machine. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Photo by Rima Kruciene on Unsplash

Observations from a slide magician...

“Slide magician”, that is what you become right after using SlideMagic for a while?

Recently, I had to go back to PowerPoint for wireframing some new app screens (it is this “free hand” doodling that is made impossible by design in SlideMagic). Here are some of my impressions.

• PowerPoint has gotten much more polished. I do not use PowerPoint that often anymore, and you see improvement in the details of the UI elements (I have developed an eye for app design now).

• Some elements are a bit intrusive. I had to work hard to save my work on a local drive rather than the Azure cloud folder, and the “AI-powered” design ideas with bold pictures and graphics took some time to switch off.

The biggest change was in my head though and has nothing to do with PowerPoint. I have become so accustomed to making slides in the SlideMagic-style (boxes and grids), that I started trying to make these slides in PowerPoint as well. And here I noticed how hard that was.

Something interesting is happening. I start to ‘forget’ certain workflows in PowerPoint, things are getting a bit rusty, compared to 3 years ago when I would fly across the user interface with the help of my custom toolbars. Maybe that is the same starting position as most PowerPoint users who are not professional designers.

Photo by Almos Bechtold on Unsplash

PowerPoint conversions back to Arial

I changed the font that SlideMagic uses for PowerPoint conversions from Calibri to Arial as of version 2.6.22.

The thought behind Calibri was that when converting slides to PowerPoint, I wanted to stick as close as possible to the box-standard Microsoft format as possible, and Calibri is the standard font for Microsoft Office applications. SlideMagic users “complained” that the PowerPoint conversions did not look very similar to the beautiful originals. So I made the change.

Helvetica (especially thin variants) looks more elegant but gives compatibility issues on Windows machines. Hence Arial it is….

Obviously when you convert your SlideMagic .magic files to PDF, you get the exact same look & feel as in the SlideMagic app. This is the workflow we should aim for. SlideMagic .magic files are the source code of your documents, PDF is how you share the result with external audiences.

Photo by Natalia Y on Unsplash

Updates to the SlideMagic PowerPoint Add-in (alpha)

Microsoft made some updates to its Office API (and SlideMagic made some changes to its server), and as a result, the SlideMagic PowerPoint add-in starts working a lot better.

The SlideMagic PowerPoint add-in is especially useful for users who download PowerPoint templates from the SlideMagic web site. Most of you are people who were subscribers to the legacy template store (RIP). Since PowerPoint conversions are a pro feature of SlideMagic, the add-in is only useful for pro subscribers.

What has changed?

• The add-in now remembers your login details across PowerPoint files No need to constantly log in (again).

• More importantly (thank you Microsoft), the SlideMagic add-in now adds slides straight into your existing PowerPoint presentation

The add-in is still an alpha phase, and things are tested for the moment in the online PowerPoint environment. I will submit it for another go for Microsoft approval to get it working with PowerPoint desktop versions as well.

Here is how to install the add-in:

1. Download the file slidemagic.xml from this link

2. Log in to your online Microsoft 365 account, click PowerPoint, and open a new presentation

3. Select “insert”, then “add-ins”

4. Select “my add-ins”, then “upload my add -in” in the top of the window (it is not available in the Microsoft store yet)

5. Select the slidemagic.xml file you just download and upload it

6. Go back to the '“home” ribbon

The add-in is installed. To use it:

1. Click the SlideMagic button and the side panel loads

2. Enter your log in details

3. Search for a template, and click the design you like

4. Click “insert” and the slide should appear in your PowerPoint presentation

While the slide is a perfect conversion from SlideMagic, you are obviously missing out on the customization features that make SlideMagic stand out from other presentation apps.

Below are the screenshots of the installation process

"10 happy users"

This tweet sums up SlideMagic’s strategy at the moment:

At long last, we finally reached a milestone we set out to hit 18 months ago: 10 happy users who don't want to go back to Chrome, use the product for hours every day, and pay for it.

I know it's a tiny number but we ruthlessly focused on making just a few people happy first.

— Suhail (@Suhail) January 25, 2021

Ten happy users who use the product for hours every day and pay for it. Presentations is a very tricky segment, and existing solutions (including those with lots and lots of installs) suffer from one of these problems:

• Users don’t think making presentations with it is fun

• Users don’t use it as their go-to presentation platform

• Users don’t see the value to pay for it

The strategy of buying millions of users and then waiting for 0.5% who might end up as a user is expensive, risky, and probably leads to the wrong product.

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

In-app tutorials

Since v2.6.18, SlideMagic has in-app onboarding tutorials. Click the ‘?’ icon in the bottom left of the app, and you will be taken around the features of the screen that is currently active. The slide edit screen also covers the general navigation inside the app. Next to the edit screen, there are page walkthroughs for the story, settings, presenter, image/icon search, and template search screens.

There is still some formatting to do, and the tutorial needs a more prominent position when you start SlideMagic for the very first time, but all in all, very useful I think. The real-time examples work much better than static tutorial pages, and now, the tutorial will always be up to date with the user interface (which is still changing now and then).

Photo by Zoltan Fekeshazi on Unsplash