Design Toolbars Add-in for PowerPoint: Conversation with Trenna Wall

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   Trenna Wall is the COO of Design Toolbars, an Australia-based company that creates a PowerPoint add-in that provides one-click slide design tools. She co-founded Design Toolbars with Davo Sime. Both worked in the London office of a large management consultancy company in the mid-1990s – one after another – so they didn’t get to meet until many years later. Then Davo joined Trenna and the Australia Graphics team in Sydney in 2011 and together, they created thousands of consulting slides over the next 6 years!

In this video interview, Trenna showcases some features of the Design Toolbars add-in for PowerPoint.

Geetesh: Hi Trenna, how are you today?

Trenna: I am great. Thank you. Geetesh. It’s good to see you.

Geetesh: The same here. Can you share something about your team that creates Design Toolbars?

Trenna: Our team is rather small. It is myself and my colleague Davo Sime. Davo is the one behind the coding and I am the person that does everything else. So we share the load.

Geetesh: That’s so awesome. There’s always a reason when you create a wonderful add-in like this. So, what motivated you to create Design Toolbars?

Trenna: Well, Davo and I worked together for six years together at a large management consultancy and we created thousands of consulting-type slides together. So we saw the need that when people left businesses like this that they did not have these tools in PowerPoint that they had in these big companies. And then we thought; we wrote it initially for ourselves because we support PowerPoint decks for a lot of these consultants. But we also realized that students and academics and many other users of PowerPoint can actually benefit from our slide design tools.

Geetesh: Awesome. So, I probably forgot to ask, where are you based out of?

Trenna: We are in Sydney, Australia. So at the moment, I’m in the city in Sydney and Davo works from home, from Bondi Beach, which is probably one of the greatest places in Sydney.

Geetesh: So, I’m going to request you to share your screen and show us a small demo of Design Toolbars.

Trenna: Sure. So, you’ll see the Design Toolbars sit on the top left of the workspace in PowerPoint. Here we’ve got up to 30 to 51 slide design tools and under Assets, we’ve got free flags, icons, maps, symbols, and templates. So, the template I have opened right now, and you can see; it’s just a very plain Title Only slide. And you can see under New Slide, it only has this one Master layout that we use with Design Toolbars. What we did with our template, we actually included a few, sort of inspired by the types of slides that you can create with Design Toolbars. So, you can see that it goes through into formatting tables, charts, images. But today I’m going to show you this slide. So, this is the sort of visual enhancements that we have included in the program. Let me just pop in my main message of the slide, which this is a very consulting type plan template, but the templates can be changed very easily on the Master slide. Let me pop in two titles and you can see that the titles come in and here I can Add Below Objects.

One of our favorites is the Percentage Circle. This works really well with icons or with text. So, I can put in that I set the circle at 85, and you can see it draws a beautiful percentage. So, these are just a few of the one-click slide design elements that we have in Design Toolbars. I thought this is a great place to start and that your viewers and your readers would be really interested in having a play around with these sorts of things.

Geetesh: I think you just showed us the tip of the iceberg now.

Trenna: Totally. There are so many we’ve got many charting and table features which are so good as well and you can see that I created this slide just really in a minute or two.

Geetesh: So how does one get this add-in? Is there a trial version available?

Trenna: We do. We actually put up a trial version every few months, for a few months. So we’ve just popped one up onto our website which is designtoolbars.com and under the Try|Buy tab, where you can download a free trial that we have, and you can actually use every single feature in our free trial.

It’s a very simple download with a Microsoft installer file and because it’s an add-in, it will install in PowerPoint for you. Our free trial is up until mid-June (2022). So, there’s a couple of months that your audience can have a play around with design toolbars.

Geetesh: That sounds so awesome. This has been wonderful, Trenna. Thank you so much for doing this video, and I’ll certainly put the link to your website in the description below, and it’s been amazing seeing this walkthrough. Thank you again Trena.

Trenna: Thank you for having us on, Geetesh, and Davo wishes he could say Hi in person but he’s busy working.

Geetesh: Okay. Certainly. Say Hi to him.

Trenna: Thanks, Geetesh.

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