Reality Check: Is Your Company PowerPoint Template Bad?

I was recently in a meeting with a potential client discussing the opportunity to become their presentation design agency. Yes, successful companies have such teams — take for example Microsoft. After the meeting we asked them if they could send us some slide decks just for us to get a feel of what types of presentations they are doing and how.

Surprisingly, we were not shocked by what we saw, so let me focus on just one of the problems that we noticed because we are seeing this over and over again — the company’s PowerPoint template.

Based on my experience, almost all companies and events out there — big or small — have a PowerPoint template that everyone in the organization is supposed to use. Where’s the problem in that, you may ask? The problem is that 99% of those templates are not proper templates.

See, most of the times presentation templates are not created by people who have experience in creating such — they are created by the PR or the Marketing departments be that the ones internal to the company or such that are hired externally. However, with all my respect, but based on everything that I have seen up until now (except for 2 companies — HPE and Pluralsight), those folks seem to have zero idea on how and what a presentation template should look like. Let me prove that to you now. Let’s see if your PowerPoint template is good or bad:

• Your “template” has just an opening and an ending slide. Sometimes an agenda and a transition slides. Sometimes…
• Because your “template” does not have any other master slides, but the above, there are no example slides which show the presenter how a specific type of information should look on the slide and how it shouldn’t…
• Not only there are no example slides, but there are no instructions on how to achieve those example slides(in the Notes section / via example videos or both). Why bother having it when you don’t have the above at all, right?
• Your “template” does not have a color palette with the appropriate brand colors to use next to each slide…
• Your “template” comes in only one format. Either 4:3 or 16:9. Not in both…
• Your “template” comes in just one color theme…
• There is no example presentation created with your “template”, but there’s also no library of photos, illustrations and icons created for use with it…
• …

If your “template” looks like the one described, don’t worry. It’s just broken in your company too.

Now, should I add that when a proper template is created (with the above and much more) a full day workshop or at least a nice web page with demo videos and instructions must be built that guides your employees how to use that new template or should I … not mention that?

Again — this is how it should be or at least this is the way we do it at 356labs. The reason why we spend so much time on it is clear — your company’s PowerPoint template is there to serve your company and help your employees. Not the opposite!

In case your template is broken, make a step to fix it. Share this post with a decision maker in your company or start the conversation and search for help from presentation experts. We are available at contact@356labs.com, but you are more than welcome to contact someone else. Just, please, fix it.