Finding the right symbolic comparison is often more difficult than making the actual PowerPoint chart. In a series of "chart concepts" I will give some ideas how to represent common business concepts with images.
To show that something is torn by 2 opposing forces (for example laptop user mobility and computer security) you could use this iStockPhoto image.
After downloading/purchasing, paste it in PowerPoint and stretch it to full screen size and add a few big-font words on each side. Make sure not to distort the original width/height proportions of the image.
Disclosure: no commercial interest.
Chart concept - torn by opposing forces
Finding the right symbolic comparison is often more difficult than making the actual PowerPoint chart. In a series of "chart concepts" I will give some ideas how to represent common business concepts with images.
To show that something is torn by 2 opposing forces (for example laptop user mobility and computer security) you could use this iStockPhoto image.
After downloading/purchasing, paste it in PowerPoint and stretch it to full screen size and add a few big-font words on each side. Make sure not to distort the original width/height proportions of the image.
Disclosure: no commercial interest.
pptPlex - tool for zooming inside PowerPoint
Microsoft has released a new tool for PowerPoint: pptPlex. It allows you to zoom in and out of PowerPoint slides during a presentation.
I will experiment with it more over time, but an initial application that comes up already in my mind is to start designing a presentation around just 1 huge map, or time line, and take your audience through various sections of it over the course of a presentation.
Kawasaki's 10/20/30 rule suddenly becomes 1/30/6... (1 slide, 20 minutes, font 6).
An example video below:
Thank you TechCrunch for leading me to this.
14 August - last voting day in SlideShare contest
You can find the contest here. I clicked around a few of the "business" entries and found some of the presentations beautiful, but I have yet to discover a presentation that is likely to be used in a "real" business setting. When you introduce yourself, raise awareness about an environmental issue, etc., you can go all the way in creating a "Girl-effect"-type presentation, but (repeating myself), what to do with the presentation of the final results of the customer database data cleaning project?
First content, then structure
It might sound obvious, but it is not.
Consulting projects start with a structure to lay out all the questions that need to be solved (let's look at the market, let's check our competitive advantages, etc. etc.) Some branches of theses "issue trees" (I made hundreds of them at McKinsey, Google "McKinsey issue tree" and you get a lot of examples) might turn out to be dead end streets, some branches might have to be expanded, re-written later on in the project. As more analysis comes in, the solution of the project will emerge, documented alongside the structure of your initial workplan.
At this point I would say: cut, take a break, throw away the structure.
Now that you have something to say, worry about how to say it. With the benefit of hine sight, build the structure that tells your story from scratch. Problem structure does not equal presentation structure.
Putting a color overlay on an image in PowerPoint
Often, the colors of images do not fit the color scheme of a presentation. One solution to this is to "take out the colors" of the image and replace it with a monochrome overlay with the most important color of your color scheme.
As an example I have added some nice blue to my title page picture. How to do it (PowerPoint 2007):
- Select the image
- Click the "format" menu in the top menu bar
- In the "adjust" ribbon, pick the "recolor" drop down
- Pick one of the suggested colors ("light variations" work best), or hard-key a RGB color code from you color schema in the more variations/more colors box
10 steps to clean up a PowerPoint/Excel data chart
When you hit "insert chart" in Excel or PowerPoint, a pretty ugly graph shows up. Here are the steps I take to clean things up:
- Horizontal axis: 2pt line instead of 0.75pt
- Horizontal axis: smaller font until labels show up horizontally
- Horizontal axis: no tick marks
- No chart title, instead I use the consistent PowerPoint headings
- No grid lines
- No vertical axis
- No legend (I use PowerPoint boxes to make those)
- Data labels on top of the columns
- Data label values rounded up
- "Gap width" between series 50% instead of 150%
Re-run: did PowerPoint crash shuttle Columbia?
Weekend reading. Edward Tufte's analysis of how a PowerPoint slide loaded with bullets full of technical information and an inconsistent summary heading might have contributed to the 2003 disaster of the space shuttle Columbia. (Original post in September 2005).
Persuasive sales story - buying a rug in Turkey
Guy Kawasaki re-discovered this post about persuasion tactics in the Middle East. Worth thinking about when crafting that sales presentation that has the message "buy our product" written on every slide, starting with slide 1, rather than taking a bit of time to establish a relationship with the prospect and get him in a receptive mood.
Flypaper - flash technology for the layman
A mini review. Earlier this week TechCrunch reported on a $3.5m fundraising round for Flypaper, a company that enables anyone to create flash-based presentations, and publish them on the web without any technical knowledge. I did install the application and had some time to play around with it.
Contrary to my initital expectations, Flypaper is actually a full blown downloadable desktop application (60MB plus a lot of updates after a first install). The good: it works very fast (exactly like PowerPoint would run). The bad: a slightly tricky installation process (you need the latest Microsoft .NET).
The user interface looks great and is very intuitive. Creating objects, moving them around, planning the time line of the chart, all easy and simple. If the introduction demo is a benchmark of what Flypaper can do, then this is certainly a powerful application.
The big question: powerful graphics processing power often does not give the best results in the hands of the layman (the target segment of Flypaper). The clearest examples of this are the animations in PowerPoint, often used for spectacularly animated transitions between slides that usually annoy the audience or makes the audience laugh at the presenter instead of taking him seriously. Some of the example presentations posted on the Flypaper web site use effects that in my opinion do not necessarily add to the communication impact of the presentation.
A big pro is a much clearer framework to build a structure of clickable links in a presentation. This can be tricky and complicated to do in PowerPoint.
I can see some useful applications:
- Slow zoom/move of a big image to get a "documentary" effect
- Animated demos of complex products/processes
- "Girl effect"-style presentations
How to create a McKinsey-style waterfall chart
The "water fall" chart is an effective way to summarize the quantitative impact of a number of drivers. For example, you need to put the following story in a chart:
"Our profits went up by 7, the positive effect of higher prices and lower cost was offset by a lower sales volume."
A waterfall chart would look something like this:
For illustration purposes I left the light grey color and data labels of the supporting series in so you can see how to make the chart: it is basically a stacked bar chart with 3 series:
For a final touch, make the color of the light grey series white, take out the data tables and that's it.
There is the temptation to make automated tools (in Excel) that do the work for you. Like almost all my charts, I start with a piece of paper and make my waterfalls manually, to make sure that they
For illustration purposes I left the light grey color and data labels of the supporting series in so you can see how to make the chart: it is basically a stacked bar chart with 3 series:
- A "white" series to support the drivers
- One series for the drivers
- One series for the (sub)totals
For a final touch, make the color of the light grey series white, take out the data tables and that's it.
There is the temptation to make automated tools (in Excel) that do the work for you. Like almost all my charts, I start with a piece of paper and make my waterfalls manually, to make sure that they
- Are correct (negative numbers can make these charts a bit tricky to get right sometimes)
- The chart tells the story I want it to tell (what subtotals to use, in what order to list factors, etc.).
PowerPoint on a napkin
I added the book "The back of the napkin" to my Amazon wish list and hope to review it here soon. It reminds me how I always start the design of every PowerPoint chart I make: on a piece of paper. I guess the practice was hardwired in my brain when I started as an analyst at McKinsey that - in the early 90s - still employed graphics designers to create charts from paper.
- Step 1: think of the general concept you would like to show: a trend, that something is too complicated, the something is small, very big, that we want to change direction, that there is a tension we need to resolve, that we can stand up as David to Goliath, etc. etc.
- Step 2: Now think of a visual analogy that can make this single point. I often prefer using a page-filling picture to make a point (a hammer hitting a nail, cracks in a wall, a rope that is about to snap) , other symbols such arrows that show forces, a simple and clean column chart to show a series of numbers, a huge font number to show that something is indeed huge, etc.
- Step 3: Scribble the chart and put it in PPT. Lack of a good image, or graphical skill shortcomings (I am only human) often force me to go back to step 2 at this point.
Free Powerpoint to PDF conversion
Until recently, I used PDFs mainly for sending out formal/final presentations that could not be edited anymore. That has changed: increased use of images have made PPT so large that the PDF format is now my preferred exchange format with clients. At the end of the project we send the source file across.I purchased Adobe Acrobat 8, but have since then found that Microsoft's PDF plugin (you can find it here) is actually much better:
- It's free (too bad for me, I already purchased Acrobat)
- It's (much) faster
- It converts better, especially the new sophisticated drop shadows of PPT 2007 do not come out well in a PDF converted by Acrobat 8
Googling for free McKinsey PowerPoint templates
Doing a Google search for "McKinsey PowerPoint templates" highlights many entries that are almost all a violation of copy right. Moreoever, the templates are of little use to someone who is not working at McKinsey team on a client engagement.
First of all: presentation starts with substance, then follow the frameworks (if any)
A bit of historical context. I recognize the frameworks from my time at McKinsey, almost all of them are from the early 90s, when McKinsey was still working with an early pre-PowerPoint presentation tool called "Solo". Solo was developed specifically for McKinsey, later marketed as an independent application. It vanished when PowerPoint emerged, not because PowerPoint at that time was neccesarily better, but all of McKinsey's clients were running it and using it to edit presentations. (A slightly outdated looking site is still offering it for sale?).
Your graphics assistant (nobody knew how to make charts themselves then), would dive into the template database to find "something that uses 4 arrows". All these frameworks were meant to be used in densely written strategy/micro-economics documents, not in convincing on-screen presentations.
If you would like to learn about McKinsey's approach to graphics and presentations, try this:
- The content available on the McKinsey Quarterly site (most of which look actually better than "day-to-day" work)
- For the chart "Bible" that was used in the early 90s, flick through a copy of the book "Say it with charts" by Gene Zelazny. (I see he's updated it since I last saw it).
- The foundation of McKinsey's approach to writing logical story lines (but not always the most compelling stories that are important in presentations) can be found in Barbera Minto's book "The Pyramid Principle"
- UPDATE: I posted about a question I get often: how to make a McKinsey waterfall chart here.
Presentation ice breaker: sell!, sell!, sell!
One of the best ways to open a company sales conference is the Muppets "Sell! sell! sell!" video.
Watch the demo here. Make sure to listen to the audio as well.
It still works, even for people that have seen the video (many times) before.
Startup pitch advice available on the web
There is some useful material available on the web for entrepreneurs seeking to pitch their startup to potential investors. I will use this post to bookmark a few of them. Some of these are great, some of these are less good. Anyhow, here we go:
- The TechCrunch pitch guidelines, and Jason Calacanis' recommendations on how to "demo your startup", part two is here.
- VC funding for geeks by Mark Hedlund
- Top 10 VC objections posted on Altgate
- Alliance of Angeles presentation guidelines, and downloadable template. (Thank you Bryan Starbuck for leading me to this)
- With a bit of humor, Zapmeals a fake company pitch presentation
- Advice by David. S. Rose
- Brad Feld on the Torturous world of PowerPoint
- Guy Kawasaki's the art of pitching
PowerPoint tracker pages - empty screen real estate
Tracker pages - they originated in the days of the overhead transparencies. You would take the content page of the document (very detailed bullet points), make a number of copies and draw a red arrow with a pen to the left of each menu item.
I don't like tracker pages, it's a sign that either your presentation is too large, or the structure of your story is so unclear that you need a forced framework to remind the audience how many menu items they still have to sit through.
"Pause" slides can help though. With a huge font, you cant put up a question, take a break in your story, build up excitement.
What to do with the white space in the background. These type of slides are a great opportunity to insert images that do not fit into the presentation story, but offer great additional background. For example, in a company presentation of a consumer goods manufacturer, I used high-quality, page-covering images of typical Israeli supermarkets, bars, cafes, etc. Put a little white line in the background with subject, time and place.
Other ideas (all related to company introduction presentations): close-ups of random employees, office locations that give a sense of the city you are located, etc.
How to start your presentation
The first slide of a presentation is even more difficult to construct than the last one.
The worst introduction slide is a list of bullets that tells the entire presentation story - in a boring way. Because the presenter wants to be quick, generic, hollow statements are used:
- "we have a great team
- "we will have $100m revenues in 3 years"
- "our architecture is scalable and flexible"
- Who are you? People are trying to figure you out in the first seconds
- What is this company about "roughly"
- A teaser or interesting story that gets the audience interested in hearing the actual presentation
Sticking logos / PowerPoint objects on 3D images
As promised in a previous posting, here a little secret. The Rolls Royce solution to this is the "vanishing point" filter in Adobe Photoshop (see one of many YouTube videos that explain the trick). In PowerPoint you can imitate it as follows.
Create the 2D object in Powerpoint by either
- Combining PowerPoint shapes and text, and group it.Do control-X to cut and and "paste special" as a GIF
- Copying an image (a logo) with a very clear outline and blank out the white surroundings using (after selecting the image): Format, Recolor, Set transparent color (PowerPoint 2007)
- Taking a logo, copy it on a rectangular white box, group, control-X and paste special as a GIF
Why write a heavy business plan that nobody reads?
Many of my start-up clients that go into a fund raising round want to develop a "heavy" (i.e., many pages) business plan in reality is nothing more than expanding a 30-page PowerPoint presentation into 100 pages of full text. "The potential investor asked for it".
A waste of time.
- People don't read it
- It takes a lot of time and money to write it
- It takes a loft of time and money to update it
- Nobody updates it
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