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Slides that stick

Helping you design better PowerPoint presentations


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.

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.



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.

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.

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:

Making similar boxes the exact same size, and exactly aligned matters a  lot in slide design. The brain gets distracted when object alignments is just a bit off.

Usually the slide starts out OK, ctrl-C/ctrl-V a bunch of objects and they are all exactly identical. Over time, things start to degrade. Accidentally resizing things a bit, moving a box a bit, etc.

You're the owner/founder of the company and you are pitching to a potential investor. When introducing the company, you always start with its history:

One the biggest hassle of PowerPoint 2003 was that when you resized a data chart, all the fonts got completely squeezed. Only PowerPoint pros new that you had to open the chart, and once it's open in Microsoft Graph, you can resize the object without doing damage. Any other person (99.99% of the population) went for the squeeze.


File naming

The number of images on my hard drive is spinning out of control and I never got around to using dedicated software with image tags for my images (maybe I should). Lately, I am paying more attention when naming an image file. And the one thing that helped me most is to put the noun first. For example:

  • sky_sunny.jpg
  • sunny_sky.jpg. 

The latter is how we are used to think, the first is best for sorting and finding things on a computer.

OK, I did my first presentation in a 1-on-1 meeting using an iPad. It was a bit improvised, as I made a last minute decision to drop a paper copy for the new gadget. My experiences.

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