presentaid Charts: Conversation with Laszlo Diewald

    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 the new presentaid Charts feature.

Geetesh: Laszlo, let’s start with the “why.” presentaid already had a Gantt chart for project timelines. What made now the right time to expand into a full charting feature with waterfalls, Mekkos, and the rest.

Laszlo: A Gantt chart answers when. Almost everything else in a strategy deck answers how much – and why.

We had spent years covering the rest of the deck: agenda slides, alignment and formatting, the design checker, live data grids, automated reporting. Someone could build nearly an entire pack without leaving presentaid. Then they would hit one slide that needed a bridge from last year’s EBITDA to this year’s, and they would leave. Charts weren’t a gap in our feature list. They were the last reason to have a second tool installed.

The other half of the answer is about our industries specifically. In consulting and financial services, the chart is not an illustration of the argument – it is the argument. A waterfall showing exactly where the margin went. A Mekko showing that most of the revenue sits in the segment growing slowest. If that is the work you do, you are not shopping for “charting”. You want the four or five chart types your industry actually argues with, done properly, with the annotations that make the point visible. That is a far narrower problem than building a general chart engine, and it is why we could do it well rather than broadly.

There is also a compounding effect we underestimated. The same numbers turn up in a monthly status report, a board pack and a pitch deck. If the charts live in a different tool from the rest of your deck automation, you rebuild them three times – and you get to explain three slightly different versions of the same figure.

Geetesh: The presentaid documentation is emphatic that these stay native PowerPoint charts, with a real embedded data sheet, rather than flattened images or shape groups. Walk us through how that works day to day, from inserting a waterfall or Mekko chart, decorating it with growth arrows or CAGR lines, to linking it live to an Excel file, and what happens when someone without presentaid opens that same deck.

Laszlo: Start with the insert. You pick Waterfall from the gallery and you get a PowerPoint chart. Not a picture of one, not a group of shapes pretending to be one – the real thing, with its own embedded data sheet behind it. Click Edit Data and you are in the spreadsheet you already know how to use.

Then you decorate. Select the chart and a small toolbar appears above it.

Add a growth arrow between two columns, a CAGR line across the series, total labels above the stacks. The part that matters is what those annotations are attached to: the chart, not the slide. An arrow knows it runs from the top of the 2026 column to the top of the 2028 column. Change a number and it moves with it. Resize the chart and the whole layer re-lays itself out – arrows shift so they don’t cross each other, labels flip between black and white so they stay readable against whatever color they land on.

Linking to Excel works the same way. You point at a workbook and a range, and we write those numbers into the chart’s own data sheet. The link is a convenience, never a dependency – the deck is complete and correct without the source file anywhere near it. When that file changes, an amber “Data changed” chip appears on the toolbar and waits. It will not refresh behind your back. Ten minutes before a board meeting is not when you want figures moving on their own.

Then someone without presentaid opens the deck – and sees a chart. That is the whole design goal.

They can click it, edit the data, recolor it, drop it into a client pack, print it. The arrows and labels are ordinary PowerPoint shapes. Nothing is greyed out, nothing says, “install this add-in to view”, and nothing collapses into a flat image the first time a number changes. That matters commercially: our users send decks to clients, regulators and boards, and they cannot ask any of them to buy software first.

If a colleague edits the numbers without presentaid, the chart updates immediately, but the arrows and labels stay as they were until someone with presentaid opens the file and they recompute. We took that trade deliberately. The alternative is a proprietary object that only renders for license holders, and we are not willing to hold a customer’s deck hostage to our own software.

Geetesh: PowerPoint already ships with its own native chart engine, and plenty of add-ins layer chart types on top of it. What does presentaid’s charting feature add that Microsoft’s own implementation doesn’t, and how do you see it standing apart from other chart add-ins on the market?

Laszlo: PowerPoint gives you the chart types that Excel gives and stops there. No Mekko. No bridge worth the name. And there is no way to put a growth arrow on a column and have it stay attached. You can draw an arrow, of course, but it is a floating shape, and it is wrong the moment anything moves.

That last point is the entire game. Almost everyone in our industries already annotates their charts. They just do it by hand, with text boxes and lines, and then they do it again next month when the actuals land.

It is very important for us to send this message: We didn’t add chart types. We added a layer that understands the chart underneath it.

Arrows anchored to data points rather than coordinates. Labels that move aside instead of overlapping. Axis breaks that keep the gridlines aligned when one bar dwarfs the rest. Charts on the same slide sharing a scale, so the comparison is honest. And a company chart style that applies the moment a chart is inserted – a hundred consultants produce decks that look like they came from the same firm, without any of them thinking about it.

On other chart add-ins, I would rather say what we optimize for than characterize anyone else. Two things. First, native output, for every reason we just went through. Second – and this is the real difference – presentaid is not a chart add-in that learned to do decks. It is a deck add-in that now does charts.

The person building a pitch deck needs agenda slides, alignment, a design check before it leaves the building, live data grids, a Gantt, automated reporting – and charts. Most power users in banking and consulting are running two or three tools to cover that. They pay for the overlap, and they live with the seams between them. We can now be the one.

That is the honest version of the pitch. Not “we have more chart types than the next tool”. It is that this was the last gap we had, and closing it means you do not need anything else.

None of which is worth arguing about on paper. This is a tool you judge by building one chart with it – so take the deck you dread rebuilding every month and put it through ours. Try it on your own numbers. presentaid is a PowerPoint add-in for people who live in decks – charts, agendas, alignment, design checking and automated reporting in one place.

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