presentaid: Conversation with Laszlo Diewald

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    Laszlo Diewald has been working as a consultant for more than 10 years now. He started his career as an employee right after his study at the Technical University of Munich. Shortly after, he decided to become self-employed as a freelance consultant. In 2017, he founded his own consultancy, with a focus on large scale projects in the financial sector. In parallel, he started working on presentaid, which was finally launched in April 2022.

In this conversation, Laszlo talks about presentaid.

Geetesh: Laszlo, tell us more about your PowerPoint add-in, presentaid. What led to its creation, and who is a typical user, according to you?

Laszlo: I think the starting point of the creation of presentaid was the typical PowerPoint add-in founder story. I worked as a consultant and as part of my everyday work, I used PowerPoint and Excel quite a lot. In particular in my junior years, the tasks were repetitive and rather boring. And I thought to myself that moving a couple of shapes from left to right is not what our clients are paying us for. So, a colleague and I looked for a way to automate these tasks to have more time to focus on the actual project content and create a value added for the client. Even though there were already some add-ins in the market, none of these matched our requirements for easy-to-use formatting and alignment functions and, even more important, auto generating slides, like regular status reports. The rest is history.

Our typical users are PowerPoint super users, in particular working in the context of change and project management where there is lots of information that needs to be distributed to various groups with different seniority levels.

Geetesh: How can users benefit by using presentaid? Can you share some typical usage scenarios. Also, how much quicker is it to achieve these tasks by using presentaid, compared to doing them in PowerPoint without presentaid?

Laszlo: Overall, presentaid supports users in creating slides faster and making it easier to stick to your formatting conventions, e.g. applying the corporate design of your company. We very often see the use case that status reports, project stories, etc. need to be presented to forums like steering committees, board meetings, … on a regular basis. The format of the slides is already given, so why not populate them with your data at the push of a button rather than updating the slides manually?

Here’s a video of presentaid’s Dynamic Grid feature.

Also, one of my favorite use cases is the following: You have a RAG status on your slide, and you want to change the status from amber to green. Usually, you would either go for the next best green color you can find and possibly violate your corporate design. Or you search for a template of that green sticker that you used in another presentation before to copy-paste it. With presentaid you can literally just select your current amber status and a dropdown shows up which lets you select another status in your corporate design with just 2 clicks.

Here’s a video of presentaid’s Smart Sticker feature.

There are plenty of other functionalities, like a slide library (with the support of shared libraries for your company and team), save/send selected slides (as a small efficiency booster), an auto alignment function that we call “Clever Cluster” which is basically a one click experience to align shapes on your slide.

Here’s a video of presentaid’s Clever Cluster feature.

The time you save with presentaid highly depends on your use cases, but in particular in the project management and PMO space, our users report time savings of up to 50%. In the video below, you can see yourself how easy it is to create a stunning report in PowerPoint with just a few clicks:

Geetesh: How much does presentaid cost? Also, do you offer a trial version?

Laszlo: For a single user, we offer a monthly subscription at 23 Euro (net) and a yearly subscription at 248 Euro (net). Of course, we also offer a free 30-day trial version so you can check if presentaid helps you with your use cases. You can start your free trial on our website.

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.