Slidewise 3: Conversation with Mike Power

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      Mike Power owns and runs Neuxpower, the company behind the popular file compressor NXPowerLite and the amazing PowerPoint add-in, Slidewise. He has been running Neuxpower for more than 25 years, which makes him feel a tiny bit old. When at work he enjoys designing useful software, and is really loving the challenge of making Slidewise powerful, yet easy to use.

In this conversation, Mike talks about Slidewise’ new version 3. Slidewise is a PowerPoint add-in that helps users to find, edit, and control their presentation content more efficiently.

Geetesh: Mike, Slidewise 3 introduces several smart enhancements—what was the biggest user pain point or feedback that drove this update?

Mike: We always intended that this next release would be headlined by the Replace Colors feature. It’s been in demand for a long time – and it’s just taken us a while to be able to design and build a feature that was up to our standards.

However, in terms of the biggest user pain point – I think the change language feature must be near the top of the list. When we first investigated proofing languages it quickly became clear how frustrating this could be for people collaborating across different geographies. We wrote a blog post at the time to try and describe how languages worked in PowerPoint and how to control them.

Thankfully, now we’ve built this feature – I think this pain point is well and truly dealt with.

Geetesh: What was the most rewarding (or surprising) moment for you and the team while building Slidewise 3?

Mike: The most rewarding moment was finally getting the user interface for Replace Colors working. There is so much color information inside PowerPoint, and it can be bewilderingly complicated – so it took an extraordinary amount of effort get to the point where we could present it in a simple way that felt easy to understand and use. I think it was one of our hardest design and implementation challenges to date. It was super-satisfying to use it ourselves for the first time, and we’re also excited to see how helpful it becomes for customers. 😊

Geetesh: Looking ahead, how do you envision Slidewise evolving beyond version 3—are there any long-term goals or big ideas on your roadmap?

Mike: We have one or two big ideas that we are musing on, however, before we tackle any more big ideas our medium-term goal for Slidewise, is to consolidate and refine its existing features. Slidewise offers a wide array of tools, but some are not fully developed and require further improvement to reach their full potential.

The Replace Image feature is a great example: It can quickly replace every instance of a JPEG image in your presentation without affecting any applied effects. However, it cannot replace only selected instances of an image, and it also cannot yet replace one image format with another, e.g. a JPEG image with a PNG image.

The External links information feature in Slidewise is another example. Currently, Slidewise collects all the links in your presentation but still requires you to check each one manually. Adding an automated link checker will be a huge time-saver!

Moving forward our focus is on enhancing these existing features to make them truly game changing.

Geetesh: For those curious about Slidewise 3, what’s the best way for users to try it out—and are there any trial options or resources to help them get started?

Mike: Slidewise is available with a fully functional 30-day trial. It’s $79 per year with volume discounts from 10 users and we also offer a non-profit discount 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.