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…

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.

How to align bullet points in PowerPoint

One of the PowerPoint annoyances is that bullet point paragraphs are not aligned properly when overflowing to the next line. It’s easy to fix.

Display the ruler (view menu), select the text, and move the little markers, leaving the…

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.

The McKinsey — or any consulting — presentation

The vast majority of Google traffic that lands on my site is looking for advice on how to write a “McKinsey presentations”. Let’s discuss them a little bit more, including my logic why they might NOT be suitable for just any communication…

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:

1. Horizontal axis: 2pt line instead of 0.75pt

Presentation ice breaker: sell!, sell!, sell!

One of the best ways to open a company sales conference is the Muppets “Sell…

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…