Presentation Summit 2026: Conversation with Nolan Haims

    Nolan Haims has over 25 years of experience in the fields of visual communications and presentation, having created every type of presentation from Fortune 500 CEO keynotes to TED talks to multi-million-dollar agency pitches.

As Director of Presentation for Edelman, the world’s largest PR firm, he created and ran a department dedicated to raising the agency’s bar on visual communication and created winning pitches worth millions.

He trains organizations to think visually, speaks at national conferences, and is a co-host of the long-running Presentation Podcast. As one of only 40 Microsoft PowerPoint MVPs in the world, he works with and advises the software development team. He runs his own visual communications consultancy in Montclair, NJ. He is the author of The Better Deck Deck.

In this conversation, Nolan talks about his participation at the upcoming Presentation Summit 2026, being held virtually from September 13 to 16, 2026.

Indezine.com is the official media partner for the Presentation Summit.

Geetesh: Nolan, your session this year is No More Frankendecks! For those who haven’t run into the term before, what exactly is a Frankendeck, and what will attendees walk away being able to do differently after this session?

Nolan: A Frankendeck is a presentation stitched together from slides pulled out of multiple files: different masters, different design systems, different everything. The result is exactly what the name implies: a monster. Inconsistent fonts, broken layouts, rogue color schemes, and a file that behaves unpredictably every time you touch it. Almost everyone has made one, and almost everyone has suffered through fixing one. The problem is that PowerPoint doesn’t make it easy to merge slides cleanly, but there are real solutions, smart best practices, and ways to sidestep the most common gotcha moments before they happen. Attendees will walk away with a more reliable process, more predictable results, and a lot less stress.

Geetesh: You’ve been coming back to the Presentation Summit for several years now. How has the audience’s relationship with templates and masters, or even PowerPoint as a whole changed over that time, if at all?

Nolan: The Summit audience has genuinely leveled up over the years — there’s a much deeper baseline understanding of masters, layouts, and what’s actually happening under the hood in PowerPoint.

But I’d argue that makes this moment even more interesting, not less. Masters and templates are still genuinely confusing even for seasoned users, so there’s always room for shared learning. And right now, AI has thrown a wrench into all of it – it tends to generate slides with very little respect for existing masters and layouts, which means humans still have to do a lot of the heavy lifting to keep things coherent. If there was ever a time to really solidify your knowledge of how PowerPoint’s template system works, it’s now.

Geetesh: When you’re not delivering sessions, what does the rest of your work actually look like day to day?

Nolan Haims Creative works with clients across industries on presentation design, template builds, and a fair amount of traditional graphic design. As I write this, we’re designing posters and brochures for the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard and MIT, working on a brand project for an NGO focused on global climate issues, and building out a CEO keynote.

But the work I spend the most time on – and honestly the work I find most rewarding – is teaching. Through our Present Your Story and Present Your Data training programs., we train organizations in person and remotely on how to communicate more clearly, present data more honestly, and build slides that actually serve the story. Oh, and we’re always shipping out copies of Better Deck Deck.

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.