Ampler: Conversation with Kristian Johansen

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  Kristian Johansen is CEO and founder of Ampler, an integrated productivity platform for Microsoft Office. Ampler enables users to work faster, easier, and more efficiently in PowerPoint, Word, and Excel, and includes a series of tools that can be integrated into existing Office installations. Kristian has a background as a management consultant from Bain & Co, and has crafted thousands and thousands of slides and Excel models during his career.

In this conversation, Kristian talks about Ampler.

Geetesh: Kristian, please tell us more about Ampler. How would you describe this PowerPoint and Microsoft Office add-in, and what motivated you to create it?

Kristian: Thanks Geetesh. That is a great question. Let me start by describing Ampler.

We like to say that:

Ampler lets you effortlessly achieve professional excellence by adapting Office to perfectly suit your needs.

Ampler works for PowerPoint, Excel or Word, and contains hundreds of tools, features, and functions. Really. Everything from small tweaks that will save a user a couple of clicks on everyday operations to innovative time-saving and quality assuring functions that save users many hours, and greatly elevate the quality of their output.

We present within PowerPoint a dedicated toolbar, directly in-program. The toolbar is 100% customizable and can be set up exactly to our users pleasing with their own name, colors, preferred tools, etc.

Of the many features we have, a few that I’d like to highlight are:

Ampler Charts allows users to quickly knock out great-looking charts in minutes. Literally. We cover every type of chart one could imagine from stacked to Mekkos to Gantts.

Ampler also has an extensive Library function, where templates, stock slides, and visual assets are easily available directly in the task pane, enabling easy sharing and collaboration within teams via team/case-specific sections. Our search algorithm ensures that everything is found instantly.

Our Scan and Fix function quickly sweeps even large presentations for errors and inconsistencies, allowing for thorough quality assurance and easy correcting of errors, deviations, and inconsistencies. Examples include ensuring uniform use of abbreviations, check for use of non-standard/non-corporate colors, fonts, or formats, alignment of graphic elements throughout the presentation, matching between footnotes and footnotes markers, checking for variance in the use of decimal separators, and much, much more.

We also have several advanced Excel functions, e.g. a Check function, which checks financial models for the ~30 most common logic design mistakes within seconds, and an intuitive Visualize function that provides an overview of how an Excel model is constructed and finds potential errors.

Ampler is battle-tested and has been in commercial use for about five years now, and is used by every day by thousands of consultants and employees. We know from our studies that consultants in a crunch save more than three hours weekly when using our solutions, and get a better end product to their clients. We’re lucky to count some of the big global management consultancy firms, large Private Equity firms, and global enterprises amongst our customers.

To the second half of your question, my own background is in management consulting. And as you know, consultants like to make a lot of slides. A lot! I was always focused on optimizing my work and time, and at some point in time, me and a colleague began collecting and developing VBA macros, tips, and hacks. And one thing really just led to another, and eventually, together with a third founder, we founded Ampler.

Our motivation was twofold really. First, we wanted to build all the tools that we wished we had had ourselves and make them available to everyone working in PowerPoint, Excel, or Word. And second, although, there are some pretty good tools already available in the market we felt that none of them were really perfect. Either they’re too rigid in the formatting options, too narrow in focus, or well, something else.

Geetesh: What are the first few steps that new Ampler users can take to quickly become productive and save time? Please share your thoughts.

Kristian: This is also a great question, Geetesh. Thanks.

Ampler is really intuitive to use. Really intuitive! Once downloaded, the Ampler toolbar is presented as a Ribbon tab, and users can immediately start using the tools. Some users like to just start playing around and exploring the tools.

Others like a more structured approach. For these, a good place to start is to just flip through the user manual. It is a collection of slides, available directly on the Ribbon, that walks through most of the tools and functions.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.