Re-discovering Smart Art

Smart art inside PowerPoint is a semi-automated template engine for diagrams. It easy to add and remove boxes/bubbles, edit text. The idea is good, but I have not used them a lot:

• The standard out-of-the-box formatting is ugly

Which color schemes work?

You cannot argue about taste, and there are no rules about what color combinations work or not. But somehow there are color schemes that come out great in a presentation, and with certain ones I have a very hard time making a deck look good. Here are my random experiences:

Review: iPad note taking

Handwritten notes are very important in presentation design. I use 2 kinds:

1. A very small note book with a beautiful leather cover to take meeting notes
2. The back pages of old print out for slide design (I take more pages out than I…

Tables as grids for logo pages

Organizing a messy page full of logos into an neat grid can be a pain. Most of the time, I use a simple PowerPoint table to do this. Figure out the required number of rows and columns, draw a table, reformat to a white background with very thin grey separator lines. Now you…

Need a simple planning tool

Business is going well and I am in need of a basic time planning tool. My work style has changed from one that is management consulting-like (1 project at a time, from start to finish), to a more erratic (creative?) work schedule. I take on many projects at the same time, ponder…

How to export a chart from Excel to PowerPoint?

Yesterday’s post triggered this question: how to export a chart from Excel to PowerPoint? The short answer: copy the data not the chart.



Standard Excel charts are ugly, they have the wrong formatting, they have the wrong colors, axis labels are…