PowerPoint guides using xScope

One of the most annoying shortcomings of PowerPoint 2011 for Mac is the inability to lock drawing guides. An external app can solve the issue.

A guide is a thin blue line on your design canvas along which you can align slide objects. If you drag an object close to the line, the object snaps into place. In this way objects on multiple pages are positioned in exactly the right place. I use them to mark slide borders, and more importantly the vertical center of my drawing canvas when it does not coincide with the center of the screen.

It is very important that these drawing guides stay exactly in the right location, and this is the issue. As soon as your cursor comes anywhere near a drawing guide, PowerPoint will make moving the actual drawing the priority. So if you try to straighten out an object that is a little bit off and want to fixate it against the guide, PowerPoint moves the guide rather than moving or resizing the object.

xScope (affiliate link) is an app for Mac that allows you to draw screen guides independent of the underlying application. The good news: PowerPoint does not move your guides anymore. The bad news, objects do not snap, you have to make sure manually that they are perfectly aligned. One other comment, the app lets you decide where to draw lines and where not when you use 2 screens. xScope does not allow you to manage this on 3 screens.

The app costs $30 and this because the guide feature is part of a full set of tools for graphics designers: measurement rulers, crosshairs, iPhone mirroring, screen shots. Most of these features I actually do not use. As a professional presentation designer, the $30 was money well spent just to sort out the drawing guide issue, I guess for most other people it is not.

Does anyone know cheaper alternatives to solve PowerPoint 2011 screen guide locking?

The table as a grid

It can be a real pain to space out logos in a logo page nicely. My trick is to use a table with a really fine grey line between cells. It is easy to adjust the grid when you need to insert and/or delete columns and/or rows.

See here an earlier post on how to make great looking logo pages.

Tables can look good

Sometimes, you do not need a data chart at all, and nicely formatted table with rounded numbers might just be the best option to visualize your data. This is especially true for financial statements with lots of information, or in situations where one chart contains a lot of numbers with completely different orders of magnitude. Some quick improvements you can make to make a table look good:

• Space out rows and columns, the more of them are the same size, the calmer the table will look 
• Round up numbers to a reasonably precision, use a “,” to separate thousands Right-align numbers, make sure the decimal dot lines up 
• Right-align the first column with descriptive text, so it is as close as possible to the first column with numbers. 
• Use highly muted background colors, I usually pick the lightest grey that I can get, and draw the cell borders with a white line 
• If necessary reduce the font size, very big fonts with unnatural line breaks do not look very good in a table. 
• Enter data manually: yes typing in every single number by hand is often the only way to get the table to look exactly the way you want it to. Fifteen minutes that are well-spent

UPDATE: on request an example of a table layout I often use.

The real case study

Case studies in investor and sales presentations are most of the time hollow and fluffy quotes that were clearly the result of an email saying “Do you mind if I quote you saying that our solution is highly flexible and scalable?”.

Here are a few ways to make a case example real:

• Focus on one specific benefit, if you try to put your entire story in the mouth of your customer, you need 30 slides, not one
• Cut the fluff
• Be very specific, and very detailed, quantify if you can. 
• Add an image of your client to make things more authentic.

Case studies can be more than a simple quote of text. If you want to show that your system can be installed within 6 weeks, why not show a bar chart of your last 10 customer installations, with the exact time it took to install the system?

Tell a real customer story.

Content creation on iPad

I have been experimenting a lot with using my iPad as a laptop replacement. It boils down to getting used to a new user interface: designing slides in Keynote works fine, and even building a spreadsheet in Numbers might be more intuitive on a touch interface, it is easier to navigate around cells. Strangely enough picking up a regular pen and paper feels a bit weird the first second after all that digital handwriting.

There is a very big issue though, an issue that was solved on the PC in the mid 1990s: multiple application windows. Quickly getting the data out of a PDF, running a side calculation in a spreadsheet, browsing through your images before putting them in a deck is simply not possible yet.

Here are some features that should be baked into a future tablet operating system:

• Touch-friendly application switching that does not create the cluttered window mess of regular computers
• A universal file format so you do not have to worry about in which application to open what
• A new clever archiving system that is not (only) dependent on file names and directories, maybe find files based on the time you were working on them, based on the people you cooperated with.

Maybe the successor to Microsoft Office is not a new series of software, but a standard file format that covers text, graphics, and calculations on top of which everyone can build applications.

Ooh, that's complicated!

Sometimes it can be useful to create a slide that is hard to understand. If your technology is really complicated and impossible to replicate, why not show it?

They easy way to show a complicated chart is to take a few pages of code, and shrink them down to font size 7. While this gives you a complicated chart, it does not convince your audience how clever your technology is.

The best way to show complexity is take a micro case example, show that it is complex, but explain it very clearly. A recent client had a very powerful real-time customer screening algorithm. To show the power of the technology, I visualized all the checks that are conducted within 0.1 s. The chart was highly readable and very clear. Still it was complex. And that was exactly the message we wanted to convey to potential investors.

Lying to potential investors?

It can be tempting to omit some details about your company in an investor presentation. Especially in the healthcare industry with its complicated data from clinical trials it is definitely possible to hide something from a potential investor until very far into the due diligence process.

A due diligence process that can takes weeks, sometimes months. You enter an exclusivity period, stop talking to other investors, continue to burn money until... the investor finds out. You lose the investment, probably not because the company all of a sudden looks completely bad, but because of you burned your integrity, your trust with a potential new Board member. And by that time your company could have run out of finances and have no other investors to talk to anymore.

Do not make an investor presentation that emphasizes your weaknesses with all the visual power in the world, on the other hand, be honest.

Custom font U-turn

After a year of experimenting with custom fonts, I noticed that I am going back to Arial more and more in my presentation design, so my decks can be read on Windows, Mac, iPad, PDF, Dropbox, SlideShark, Keynote, PowerPoint on any device in any place. Well at least it forces me to make more effort to let my slides look good if I cannot rely on a pretty font...

Dirty typography

Watch out with the text effects in PowerPoint or Keynote. A drop shadow, stroke line, and worst of all: a glow and a gradient fill can reduce the contrast of your test and make your text look dirty, especially on low-resolution screens which are often old VGA projectors in conference rooms. I prefer to keep things clean and crisp.

Startup selling to big corporate

Seth Godin wrote an excellent blog post about pitching to a large corporate: the lowest possible price is not always the most important selling point. If you are a startup, it might result in the exact opposite effect: you just reinforced the image of the small, unprofessional, desperate, unreliable, financially instable company that is too high-risk to do business with.

If all the above are in fact true for your company, there are still some easy ways to camouflage it, and become a credible business partner to a large organization:

• Show up on time, reply to questions promptly, confirm Outlook calendar invitations
• Fill out forms, purchasing orders, even if you already provided the data in a previous email
• List your real street address, list your real non-mobile phone number (can be a Skype redirect)
• Have an email address with your company domain (can be forwarded back to gmail)
• Use a decent web site template that contains more than an "under construction" place holder
• Use high res stock images in your presentation, as opposed to solen low-res Google image search results
• Get a professional photographer to make decent head shots of the team
• Do not use ad-supported free, or worse: pirated software
• Invest in business card paper
• Create a professional email signature
• Avoid Comic Sans
• Clean up your computer desktop and hid embarrassing family pictures
• Be careful with humor hardwired, written-down, in your slides, the company might not think it is funny
• Understand hierarchies, going behind someones back to her boss does not mean you made a successful move up the ladder

The list goes on. Act like the company you want to be, and you are who you want to be.

Book content requests?

I am in the middle of writing a book using Apple iBook creator platform, and hopefully it will see the light of day soon. Sorting out ISBNs and US tax numbers is almost more difficult than writing the book itself.

Other people have written extensively about why bullet points are a bad idea, my book will be a highly pragmatic and practical guide that helps you put a slide deck together that gets you funded, lands you a sale or delivers your Board approval.

This iBook format is wonderful, I can use text, slideshows, images, and interestingly videos which makes it easy to put software advice inside using a simple screen cast (software explanations are hard and very boring to put in text). And best of all, I can update the book with new content pretty much like apps update on your iPad, which allows me to ship early and improve content over time.

So, ultimately my book will be an iPad app that is open at your desk when you are putting your slides together at home, or in the office. The content is not frozen yet, so please let me know if there are specific issues I should cover, and I will see if I can incorporate them in the flow.

Online versus offline

Online, advertisers pay by the click. In the offline world, not yet. This slide was made using Photoshop's vanishing point filter and some fat Futura Condensed Extra Bold

That's it?

I sometimes get that reaction from a client. Very few slides, very simple graphics. Sometimes the most powerful stories can be pitched really sweet and short. No need to waste more words/time/slides. Consider yourself lucky.

To demo or not to demo?

If you are in the high tech sector you face the challenge of demonstrating your product in an investor or sales pitch meeting. If that meeting is short (an hour or less), my advice is not to show your product in a live demo, but use a series of carefully planned screen shots.

Murphy's law says that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. And it seems to apply especially to high tech demos. There are just so many variables that can go wrong: Internet connection, screens, the application itself.

If you are in the middle of a short pitch, any interruption will pop the momentum of your story. Ideally you want your pitch to be one focused burst of energy that gets the audience craving for more at the end. A hiccup because of WiFi password will definitely not get you there.

There is another problem with demos, not all application functionality is Interesting. Logging in, creating profiles, entering some data, all things you have to do, but they are not the piece of technology that will wow your investors or customers. And finally, a live computer screen is most of the time not readable when put on an overhead projector, most fonts are probably smaller than 12 points.

So, what to do instead. Prepare an interesting story, set it up beforehand in your application, take lots of screenshots and paste them in the right order in your presentation. Zoom in to those aspects of the screen that are interesting, crop out those window bars, ads, anything that you do not need. Circle what people,should be looking at. Put big bold explanation text boxes on the slides.

Now you have a demo that will not go wrong, is high–paced, is readable, and shows exactly the things you want the audience to see. Still it might be useful to bring your application along, but the purpose is not to showcase it in a demo, but rather point at it and say: “look here it is, we have product that you can touch”. If people in the meeting are interested to find out more, set up second, longer, meeting just to play around with the demo, after your 20 minute pitch has been delivered flawlessly. Not everyone in the audience will have an engineering degree, or will be able to understand the ins and outs of your product.

Still you should be able to explain the basic idea behind even the most complicated technology to a reasonably intelligent audience. Telling them “you won’t probably understand” is a huge offense to the audience. And remember that Einstein said that if you cannot explain something to a 6-year old, you probably do not understand it yourself.

Explaining your business model

Most investor pitches I see claim year 5 revenues of $50m to $100m, so putting in just that piece of information is not going to convince investors, you just sound like everyone else. What you need to make believable is why you are going to hit that target. Showing an incredibly complicated Excel model (”look, we did our homework”) is not going to get you there either. So the top line number is not convincing, nor is the detailed model, what works? The napkin.

When a modeling economics, I usually go brought a cycle. Start with a very simple calculation that gets to a ballpark answer, and is easy to follow and verify. Then, go I to incredible detail in an Excel model, understanding why I do, or do not get close to my initial ballpark. After the rock solid model is finished and bug free, it is time to simplify down to the level, of that very first ballpark number.

Simplification is not simple. You need to pick which drivers of your business are the most important, you need to decide which factors to show, which ones to hide. Your challenge is to stay close to values that are linked to everyday reality, not accounting. Messages per user per month, price per message instead of $m depreciation.

With all this preparation, you are now able to let your potential investor write her own ballpark or napkin calculation of the company's potential. You provide her with the basic framework, what are the 6 numbers you need to multiply in order to get to your $75m in year 5. She might not agree with all the numbers, but you gave her a framework to which to apply her own estimates. Getting the point estimate right is not important, agreeing on the order of magnitude, and the way how to get there, is.

There is also psychology involved here. Your numbers are likely to be outrageous, but can you defend them using more or less realistic inputs? Are you open to input and change your calculation? Again, discussing the financials is another way to figure you out as a CEO. Are you a sane person to work with on a day–to–day basis?

Everyone understands that you basically made up the numbers for your business forecast and their credibility might not be as high as an investment analyst forecasting next quarter’s earnings of IBM. Still there is something that will completely kill the credibility of your analysis: lack of consistency.

If you use 2 different sales numbers on 2 different pages it is a red flag that you might not be on top of your material. Even if the footnote says that the number on page 34 includes VAT and the number on page 22 does not.

Calculation errors are the same, if an investor starts checking your math on every page in the presentation, she will not be paying attention to what you have to say. When the final version of the presentation is ready, take out the calculator and check every page carefully, even if you copied data straight from Excel. Look for typos, or funny rounding errors and correct them manually.

You probably noticed that we have not discussed data from market research agencies to support your financial forecast. I consider them a data point, but not the most important input for your business plan. Almost all markets discussed by IDC or Gartner are a $billion, and most of the time have a far too broad scope for a new startup. There is one useful thing about these forecasts though, they provide a good categorization for technology markets. So now you can say “where a in the so and so business”. On the other hand, I have seen startups that had great difficulty explaining what they do because a VC could not put them in an IDC box.

So in short, explain your business’ economics in a simple human language.

Abstract versus realistic

I do a fair amount of presentation design work in the medical field and in every deck there is the challenge of explaining the technology to a layman. The medical profession uses elaborate, highly realistic, illustrations to visualize a condition or a procedure. I actually find the other approach much more effective: highly abstract, minimalist sketches that show only what needs to be shown, and eliminate everything else. The visual needs to explain what is going on, not what something looks like.

Pitching your startup

A nice and short video with tips for pitching your startup to investors on #startupstories. The lessons from entrepreneurs are useful, but pay special attention to what the investors have to say, they are your audience.

Spirals

Spirals are a great way to visualize an endless repeating of something. Stock image sites are full of images of real staircases, rendered ones, or other images that have a spiral structure. You can use the visual as-is, or add text (maybe in circles that get smaller and smaller) to shows that something is going on forever, that something is repeatable.



Some people associate a diagram like this with a downward spiral. I do not see it that way, you?

Something is missing...

Almost every pitch presentation talks about something that is missing. A simple image of a paper hole is a great way to visualize it. You can have one, you can have fifteen, you can cut out the white background and put the whole into something else. You can find hundreds of paper holes on stock image sites.

Demo presentations on iPad

I just returned from London and it was my first international business trip without a lap top in my bag. I used an iPad to demo my slide decks to potential clients.

In a (still) imperfect world, here is what I did:

• Rely on different applications for different types of documents. Keynote presentations in Keynote, PowerPoint presentations with standard font in SlideShark, and PowerPoint presentations with non-standard font in Adobe Reader.
• Ensure that you can find your decks easily, that they are all pre-loaded with good title descriptions and first slide icons.
• Go through every single presentation start to finish, to make sure that there are no glitches in fonts, animations and fix them if necessary (there were a few).
• Make sure you operate the device smoothly. All the presentation apps that you need in a meeting together on one blank home screen. Know how to get in and out of presentation mode in each of the applications (sometimes you tap, sometimes you pinch). 

The result was great and much more personal than having to open a laptop, browse through the file directory and fire up Keynote or PowerPoint. The demo was much more informal and the best features was that I could go through slides randomly, making my own story as I go along.