Re-post: creating McKinsey-style water fall charts in PowerPoint

Waterfall charts can X-ray a complicated story. Here is an explanation about the technicalities of creating one in PowerPoint, here is an example of an application.

Re-post: merging presentations without mixing up formats

When Frankensteining a deck (i.e., stitching a new presentation together from old slides), there is nothing more annoying then slide formats that go crazy when pasting in slides. Here is a trick to avoid this.

Re-post: editing overlapping objects with the selection pane

One of the best-kept secrets of PowerPoint is the selection pane, that allows you to remove overlapping objects from a slide temporarily to make it easier to edit layers. Details here in a previous post.

Re-post: PowerPoint text in a circle

PowerPoint makes it possible to morph text in a circle, read the details here in this earlier post.

Holiday posting schedule

Over the next few weeks I will be spending more time with my family, and less online (similar to what I guess many of my readers will do). Posting frequency will drop, and I will be re-posting some earlier post that I think could be useful for readers that have only joined this community recently.

IPO presentation in the public domain

Insuline Medical is a medical device company that recently IPO-ed on the Tel Aviv stock exchange. Below is the company presentation I designed for potential investors. The challenge was that the audience of this presentation did not consist of venture capitalists with a deep specialization in medical technology, rather the content had to be adjusted to an institutional investor targeting the broader stock market.

Insuline IPO presentation

My presentation design was translated into Hebrew by Eran Eisen.

The word "management"

These little annoyances in presentation design, the word "management" is one of them. You need it very often, it is relatively long, and it does not look good/readable when hyphenated. How many slides got a 2nd best design because of this word...

Every slide starts with a sketch

Painters first make a sketch before starting the final painting. Presentation designers should do the same. I have a big pile of old print outs that is my unlimited source of scrap paper. An important slide can take 5-10 page-filling rough sketches before turning to the PowerPoint editing screen.

I always carry one of these beautiful notebooks (affiliate link) with me to capture an idea that pops up in my head. Yes, a notebook and not an application such as Evernote on my iPhone because the idea is most of the time a sketch or a scribble. Hard to do in digital format.

The end of my most productive/creative days are always marked with a full paper trash can next to my desk.

The painting is Gauguin's night cafe, info about him and Van Gogh painting at this location here and here.

The lone column

A column chart with just one lone column is not a column chart. Column chart need to compare things, show a trend over time.

Quotes to dramatize a number

The site number quotes is a tool with a healthy dose of humor: it helps you "dramatize" a number, simply enter it and the site returns a long list of quotes. Maybe the exact quote is not what you can use in a "serious" presentation, but it might just open up a part of your creative brain that you did not yet access. Thank you Steven Duncan.

Chart concept - painted billboard

This vintage-style ad found on Ads of the World can easily be replicated in PowerPoint. A white box, semi-transparent with a bit of soft edges and a nice font against an image of a brick wall and you're done.

Oops, I thought I deleted that?

PowerPoint files can still contain information that you thought was long gone. Watch out with this, especially when sharing files with outsiders via email, or on content sharing platforms such as SlideShare.

The easy solution is to convert PowerPoint files to PDF. If you want to stick to the PowerPoint format, here are some things to watch out for:

• Data charts (bars, pies, columns) in PowerPoint are generated via an embedded Excel spreadsheet. Even if you did not include data in the graph, the source still sits in the Exel file. Open the spread sheet behind each chart and check whether it contains redundant data you do not want to disclose. (For example breakdowns by category, or in case of public investor presentations, forecast of financials beyond the current reporting period).
• Cropped pictures that were not compressed still remain in PowerPoint in their full size, if you reset the image it comes back in its original form. If you do not want that, select the image, then compress, then ask PowerPoint to remove the cropped areas of the image.
• Hidden content such as author information, speaker notes with informal side comments such as ("not sure whether this is true, I made it up for the moment"), or objects that are outside the canvas of the slide. In PowerPoint 2010 you can inspect your presentation for things like this in file, info, prepare for sharing.

P.S. Image tags can be an unwanted piece of information in PDFs, here is how to get rid of them.