SlideMagic 2.6.41

A new version of SlideMagic is deployed, and should automatically install. This version includes security patches, and a slightly less strong background color difference between the main slide and the explanation box view.

The explanation box is one of 4 views of SlideMagic:

1. Narrow 4 x 3 aspect ratio

2. Wide 16 x9 aspect ratio

3. Title on the side

4. Explanation box view, which creates space for an extra text box where you can enter a few paragraphs to explain a slide in case you send the deck without being present yourself.

The text in the side panel stays saved in the file even if you go to another view, so you can decide when you want to show it, and when to hide (for example in a live presentation).

Skipping the presenter mode

Presentation software like PowerPoint or SlideMagic have 2 modes: one for slide editing, and one for showing the presentation to an audience. In video calls, I often see the presenter leaving the presentation in edit mode. The slide is visible, but with all the edit controls around, plus grid lines and other markings. On the side is a list of thumbnails of all the slides in the presentation. For the presenter, this can be handy. She knows the deck in and out and can quickly jump around the slides.

For the audience it is confusing.

• The slide in edit mode looks unfinished.

• Often the thumbnails on the left are so big that you could actually read them, distracting attention away from the main slide.

In SlideMagic, presentation view creates 2 separate windows: one for the slide to be shown to the audience, one with the controls for the presenter. So in Zoom, or other video conference tools, you can share just the slide, while staying in full control of the presentation in a window that is not visible to the audience.

Brain variables

In computer programming (and math), things are stored in variables. A variable has a name and can point to pretty much anything. A numerical value, a user, another piece of code, a device, a map, an image library.

The variable is a little memory shortcut to access information. In the world of presentations, our brain works with variables as well. Visual symbols that are a shortcut to a fragment of a story.

Used in a bad way. After you have given a presentation dozens of times, the slides in your deck become ‘variables’. The page becomes a trigger for you to deliver a piece of the story. It does not really matter what the slide actually says. The audience who sees this for the first time however, misses this context.

Used in a good way. When brainstorming a story line, I often write down pieces of my store on stickers. Each sticker contains a fairly cryptic description. “The lazy point”. “Flipping is not possible”. Meaningless to anyone but me. For me however, it is a very condensed way of putting a label on a section of my story, and enables me to move things around to try out different story lines quickly.

I tried the above brainstorm a few times in a group: writing very simple text bullets in an email and move things around. The other members of the group missed the context, started editing the bullets into full sentences, discuss these, and before you know it, you have a 5 page document that is worse than the original you wanted to improve.

Dismissing the competition

If you are pitching someone who is making a choice between you and your competitors, chances are high that that person in the end will have a better understanding of the competition than you, so be careful when describing them.

I am evaluating some SAAS vendors and over the past week I asked two companies to give their perspective on each other:

• Company A about B: ‘People who want something cheap, pick them” [In a second call I found out they are not cheaper]

• Company B about A: A pretty accurate description of pros and cons of each, a good prediction of how company A would pitch, and why in my situation, company B is the better choice.

Guess which company scored higher on credibility.

Chart template for a macro economic tree

A quick make over of a chart that flew by on Twitter, explaining differences in GDP / capital between France and the US.

The productivity proximity between US and various EU countries and the difference in GDPs per capita is explained by the social choice of fewer worked hours, longer vacations, demography and labour market features, as illustrated in the slide below for France and the US (2021).1/ https://t.co/kffwt7VWLE pic.twitter.com/rvIi0sxokC

— Vitor Constâncio (@VMRConstancio) October 18, 2022

In SlideMagic, it is very easy to replace tabular data in bar charts. I have added this slide to the SlideMagic slide library, search for ‘GDP’ in the app and it will show up for you use in your own presentation.

"Our industry speaks like that"

Each industry has its own jargon, the way people like us say things. If you are sitting in a meeting and trying to pitch your services as a senior management consultant or lawyer, lowering your voice and using the jargon will show that you are one of them.

But being one of them is only one part of the pitch. Being understood is the other one. And for this purpose, it is probably better to keep things human. Especially if you do not have a lot of time: the cover email of a pitch deck, the description paragraph of a conference panel.

Be understood first, then worry about blending in.

Back

There are many holidays in Tel Aviv in the autumn, and this year they lined up to form more or less one big break. (There are years where they fall exactly on weekends). I am back at work and hope to pick my posts soon.

Executive summary degradation

Hundred pages is a bit long, let’s add an executive summary

Hmm, this chart should go in here as well, and this, and this, and this one (that analysis took a long time)

The summary needs some structure, let’s add tracker pages

Wait, is this thing we are actually saying, let’s change the recommendations in the summary

Shouldn’t we change the full document as well?

Maybe the summary has become the document, but it is a bit long…

Let’s add a summary

Writing it down

Summary presentations of strategy projects are usually a ‘greatest hits’ of slides that were produced during the project. Copy, paste, shuffle, done.

Project working document slides are not the same as final results communication slides.

It can be good practice to write out the story behind your conclusions on 1 page. Don’t summarize the analytical work, but explain why the action your recommend is the smart one. Now go back to your slide pile. You might find that not all subjects need to be covered, not every subject needs a slide, and that the order in which you tell your story might be different from the contents page of the project working document.

Grounded in reality

Economic forecasting models can get very complicated and it is easy to lose touch with reality. Assumption on assumption gets added, new market segments come in, then your manager asks you to bump up that growth by 5% per year.

Your survival? Take the current year as a starting point, and break down your total market in actual physical drivers. Then check whether these same drivers still make sense 10 years later.

Let’s take the example of the coffee market. $ spend by customer segment that growth at a certain rate over time are abstract concepts. Cups, liters, people, price per cup are things you can touch and relate to. If you think there is a premium market segment that pays double the price per liter, then you need to back out the opposite segment that pays a lot less to get back to the average. Does that reverse engineered price make sense? If the coffee market doubles, but people pay the same price, and the population isn’t really growing, where do these liters come from?

1. Break down today’s total market into factors you can touch

2. Forecast these factors (not the total numbers)

3. Build up the total market from these factors

4. Sanity check and go back to 1

In most cases, you will discover that only a factors really make the difference. And if you keep yourself grounded to reality, you can pretty much include any breakdown, split, scenario, as long as the totals and averages stay the way they were.

Perceived quality

The real quality of a car is expressed in how little time it spends in the repair shop. You are unlikely to be able to figure this out in the showroom, or in a test drive. Problems will only show up after a few months of driving.

The perceived quality of a car is a different story. The sound of a door closing, little rattles. They might have nothing to do with the actual quality of the car, but have a huge impact on how we perceive things.

Car manufacturers spend a lot of time and money on ironing out this little imperfections. Testing, testing, and testing at different speeds, different surfaces. As soon as the tiniest noise is heard, take out the statoscope (the passenger tester), locate the sound source and fix things. (A heavier material, some padding, a different screw).

There is a parallel here for your slide deck. The actual quality of the raw story, and the perceived quality of its presentation.

Being too bold

Smart use of bold text can help make a slide clearer. Overdoing it takes out the whole effect.

Why do people fall for this? If you start at your own chart for hours, rereading it, changing the line breaks, bolding and un-bolding text, you become convinced that the text is super clear. It is, for someone who has studied it for a long time. Not for someone who looks up from her phone and sees it for the first time.

P.S. Use ctrl-B (Windows) or cmd-B on selected text in SlideMagic to make things bold.

Template request: process maturity

A SlideMagic user requested additional templates in the area of organization design and benchmarking. I added these two upon request. (Don’t tell anyone the secret that these slide design request are usually put up within 24 hours after asking for them.)

Simply searching for ‘process’ in the app will reveal them, or search online via this link. Pro users can convert them to PowerPoint (students, did you see the free SlideMagic Pro plan for you?).

The quick start guide

Most appliances come with a “quick start guide” in addition to a detailed manual. A good quick start guide:

• Is not a dumbed down version of the manual

• Has an order that is natural to the new user, tackling issues as they come up

• Has a clear objective to get people going

The manual is the exhaustive reference guide written by the product engineer, the quick start guide is the pitch to the user. Think of your presentation as the quick start guide of that huge strategy document that is open in your presentation software.

The safety instructions (that no one reads)

Safety instructions, terms of use, privacy statements, safe harbor statements, nobody reads them. Lawyers have diluted them so much that it takes a long time to reverse engineer the original message. In addition, most people more or less know (or assume they know) what is written in them.

The same is true for mission statements and other corporate “standard “ texts. They all sort of say the same, many of them are not credible, and in most cases do not add anything to the story of a presentation. The audience switches off until something more interesting pops up.

In the worst case, you might have lost your audience all together. “Ah, it’s going to be one of these decks”

Streamlined signup for the free student plan

Students can get free access to SlideMagic Pro. The signup and validation process is no longer cumbersome, you can get started straight from the pricing page:

Grouping data in tables

In spreadsheets or databases, things should be clearly labeled. Every column has a heading that describes what’s in it. When it comes to slide design, you can allow yourself a bit more freedom. Look at the 2 slides below

In the second slide, I omitted detailed descriptions of data that is probably clear to the audience, and grouped things together in one box. Easier on the eye.

AI image generators

Dream Studio uses machine learning to create images based on sentences and keywords a user enters. Unlike searching for an image based on a keyword in a big data base with tagged pictures, Dream Studio would generate pixels from scratch. Some results are stunning, others have surprising errors (faces that are not finished for example).

You can also mix and match art styles (the image below is a mix up of Mondriaan and Van Gogh).

At the moment these type of services are a gimmick. People try a few creations, share them, and move on. But in a few years from now, this might be the way image “databases” work. No need for that database anymore as photographs are created on the fly,

(Another similar service is DALL-E, but it has a waiting list)

Rhetorical techniques for memorable sentences

This is a nice Twitter thread:

This line is so memorable for a reason.

It's a perfect use of antimetabole: the repetition of a phrase in successive clauses, but with its word order reversed.

Here are 8 more rhetorical devices to make your writing or speaking more memorable: pic.twitter.com/orYXa3jTZp

— The Cultural Tutor (@culturaltutor) August 21, 2022

1. Polyptoton The repeated use of words with the same root, like destroy, destroyer, and destroyed.

2. Anadiplosis The repetition of the last word of a clause at the beginning of the next.

3. Anaphora The use of the same word or words at the start of successive clauses or sentences.

4. Epizeuxis The immediate repetition of a word or phrase.

5. Epanalepsis The repetition of a word at the start and end of a clause.

6. Antithesis The use (and contrast) of two opposing ideas in a single clause or sentence.

7. Aysndeton The omission of a conjunction (e.g. and, or) from a series of related clauses.

8. Anastrophe The inversion of normal word order.

Read through the entire thread by @culturaltutor to see examples.

Automated student verification

Students are eligible for a completely free SlideMagic Pro subscription, and I have now automated the validation process for a number of markets:

• Austria

• Denmark

• France

• Italy

• Germany

• Spain

• Sweden

• The Netherlands

• Turkey

After you have registered a free account with SlideMagic, you can visit this link to start the validation process. If your account is based in one of the above countries you get instant approval. Clicking the “I am a student” button will take you to the login page of the university or school you are currently studying at. After a successful login, your SlideMagic Pro subscription will automatically be switched on.

For other countries, we are still using a partly manual approval process.

All this was made possible through a partnership with InAcademia. If you run a web site that needs student validation it is worth checking them out.