Outstanding Presentations 2015: Conversation with Taylor Croonquist

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Taylor Croonquist is the co-founder of Nuts & Bolts Speed Training, a website delivering actionable PowerPoint training and speed strategies, helping professionals cut their build time in a third. Prior to Nuts & Bolts, Taylor lived and worked in China for 10 years in finance and consulting. You can find him traveling and scuba diving when he’s not busy crafting PowerPoint training.

In this conversation, Taylor discusses his upcoming webinar tomorrow, which he will present as part of the Outstanding Presentations 2015 series.

Geetesh: Tell us more about what you do, and why you are known as the “Shortcuts Guru”?

Taylor: The way I like to think about it is that there are roughly 1,038 commands in PowerPoint…with about 60 driving 80% of most people’s build time.

Things like formatting, aligning, and all the other “fun” repetitive stuff that goes into slide creation.

And when you learn how to hook up those 60 or so commands to the four different flavors of PowerPoint shortcuts, two things happen:

1. Your time spent in PowerPoint is drastically reduced…doubling, tripling, and even quadrupling your productivity.
2. You can never go back to the “old way” of slide design again.

That’s what I teach people to do, in a nutshell, and why I’m known as the ‘Shortcuts Guru’.

Geetesh: What will you speak about in your session as part of the Outstanding Presentations series – and what would be the takeaway for attendees?

Taylor: The big takeaway is PowerPoint pest control… eliminating the RATs (“repetitive annoying tasks”) in your daily workflow.

“If it looks like a RAT, feels like a RAT… then it is definitely a RAT.”

Common RATs you’ll learn how to take care of in my session are:

1. Extracting text from tables without retyping any of the text
2. Breaking lists of bullet points into visual layouts
3. Power cropping and resizing photos (as many as you have) in less than a minute
4. Leveraging Excel to help build your PowerPoint presentation

For the last point, I’ll be demoing how you can use Excel to build a 10-minute (600-slide) countdown timer in PowerPoint in under 5 minutes… which is pretty cool!