SPICE add-in for PowerPoint: Conversation with Thomas Häger

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    Thomas Häger is the founder and owner of a Management Consulting business specialized in Operations Strategy and Working Capital Efficiency. Thomas has 20+ years of experience in Management Consulting and Business Development driving transformation projects and improvement programs in different industries. Lately Thomas is also turning the “improvement spotlight” on his own trade of Management Consulting and providing tools for more efficient and professional communication and PowerPoint sliding.

In this conversation, Thomas talks about his new SPICE add-in for PowerPoint.

Geetesh: Thomas, can you introduce your new SPICE add-in for PowerPoint. Why did you create this add-in, and who is this intended for?

Thomas: Thanks Geetesh. I would say we had primarily two reasons for putting this together.

The main one was that we wanted to try the new Web API technology for Office Add-ins. This is what Microsoft has been promoting as the new technology for add-in development for years, but it has not really been good enough to accommodate for the same type of interaction with PowerPoint as the older technology (VSTO and COM add-ins). But even if the current APIs are limited, we can still do something and if we are not using what is available, it is unlikely that Microsoft will prioritize additional development to the APIs. So, we would very much like for this add-in to find a wide user base that give us a stronger voice in nudging the API development in the direction we would like it to go. This will help us develop this add-in and other solutions down the road.

The other reason would be the value that this add-in brings our Management Consulting practice which is our “day-time job”. In Management Consulting we use PowerPoint for documentation rather than presentation. This is not what PowerPoint was designed for and we miss functionality such as table of content and footnotes. The footnote feature alone is a huge time saver in our daily work, and it is a feature we have not been able to find in any of the more established add-ins. We are proud and happy to be able to share this time saving feature with everyone.

This add-in was developed with use cases from Management Consulting in mind and this is probably also one of the main target audiences. But I would say that anyone that use PowerPoint for documentation purposes will find this useful. It also offers many little time saving tricks such as swapping positions of shapes, splitting text boxes and other things that are useful for anyone.

Geetesh: Can you share some usage scenarios where SPICE saves time or quickly creates content that would be otherwise difficult?

Thomas: There are so many competent add-ins out there that offers more than the SPICE add-in. But there are two pieces of functionality that I think are quite unique for our add-in. The number one is the footnote feature already mentioned. This gives the user a similar way of working with footnotes as we are used to from Word. You can insert a footnote to a shape and enter a value to be presented in the footer of the slide. When slides or shapes are moved around, the footer references will be updated to reflect the changes with a click of a button. Moving a shape with a footnote reference form one slide to another will automatically also move the related footer text to the new slide. This is a feature I’m sure most Consultants will find useful, but also university students, university faculty, research professionals and many others.

The other piece of functionality that I think is quite unique for SPICE is to insert geographical maps. Select a map from a menu and click the button to insert on your slide. All maps are vector graphics and can be edited as any other shape.

Geetesh: Where can one get a copy of the SPICE add-in and how much does this cost?

Thomas: I guess this is really the main benefit with this new type of Office Add-ins. They are available directly from Microsoft Store. Just go to the Insert menu in PowerPoint and click Get Add-ins. Then search the Store for “SPICE” and click Add to install. It is free of charge and there is no need for any login or credit card or anything like that. Just start using it right away. As it is distributed though Microsoft Store, it has also gone through the Microsoft certification process to give all users a good and safe user experience.

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