Presentation Summit 2026: Conversation with Troy Chollar

    Troy Chollar is co-founder and a Sr. Designer of TLC Creative Services and awarded by Microsoft as an MVP for PowerPoint for 24 consecutive years. For more than two decades, Troy has helped organizations create presentations ranging from executive briefings and sales decks to large-scale live event experiences. A regular presenter at The Presentation Summit (he was an attendee at the very first conference!), host of The Presentation Podcast, and the voice of ThePowerPointBlog, Troy is passionate about sharing practical PowerPoint techniques, animation strategies, and workflow improvements that presentation professionals can immediately apply to their own projects.

In this conversation, Troy talks about 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: Troy, you’re delivering two sessions this year, Design Faster! and PowerPoint Animation for Grown-Ups. Design Faster! combines a Stream Deck, add-ins, and QAT tricks into one workflow. What led you to bring these three specific tools together rather than treating them separately?

Troy: I will focus on the Design Faster! session because that’s where I’ll be diving into my real-world use of a Stream Deck, PowerPoint add-ins, and customized Quick Access Toolbar. While these are all tools, the common thread isn’t the tools themselves, it’s the workflows they enable. This session is about how to setup a workflow that makes presentation design faster – using some amazing tools!

Over the years at TLC Creative Services, I’ve realized that most presentation designers lose far more time to small interruptions than to big challenges. We spend our days repeating hundreds of little actions: formatting objects, aligning content, switching between commands, and navigating menus. Each action is generally relatively minor, but without an efficient workflow those moments add up to an amazing amount of wasted time every day.

The Stream Deck, PowerPoint add-ins, and the Quick Access Toolbar each solve different parts of that workflow problem. Individually, they’re useful tools. Combined, we can create a design workflow that is noticeably faster, more consistent, and enables us to create design and layouts.

My goal is not to convince attendees they need specific tools. It’s to show how thinking intentionally about your design workflow can eliminate friction, streamline the repetitive work, and let you spend more time designing with less time clicking.

Geetesh: PowerPoint Animation for Grown-Ups looks at advanced animation to improve clarity, not just add polish. Where do you draw the line between animation that helps communication and animation that gets in its way?

Troy: The line for me is whether the motion is helping the audience know where to look and what to understand.

For me, presentation animation is any onscreen motion the audience sees. That includes effects from the animation pane, slide transitions, video, and even unintended movement when elements jump between slides (I hate seeing that!). The rule is, motion automatically attracts attention – so every movement needs a reason.

Everyone hears me talk about animation and showcase cool things. But animation in a presentation is not always good. It starts getting in the way when it becomes inconsistent or creates what I call “animation noise.” If the audience is focused on anticipating the next effect instead of listening to the presenter, the animation is working against the message.

Conversely, good animation establishes a consistent rhythm and controls the flow of information. It can reveal a process, bring focus to a specific item as the presenter is discussing it, and guide the audience through dense content.

My basic test is: Should this animate at all? If the motion supports the content and the presenter, it belongs. If the audience notices the effect more than the message, it probably does not.

Of course, this is still a Presentation Summit session, so we’ll talk about animation philosophy, but we’ll spend even more time showcasing some amazing PowerPoint techniques and examples that everyone can apply to their own presentations!

Geetesh: Your studio has spent years pushing PowerPoint into live event territory, large screens, synchronized multi-screen setups, that kind of scale. Has any of that “big stage” thinking made its way into how you approach a single laptop presentation?

Troy Absolutely. Working on large-scale events forces you to become very intentional about the audience experience. When you’re creating content for an amazing 200-foot-wide LED wall in a general session, every element has to earn its place. The slide design needs to work in the environment and have purpose and precision. Those aren’t optional because audiences immediately notice awkward design or content that is not literally pixel perfect.

That mindset transfers directly to a laptop presentation, an advisor board meeting, or breakout room with a 50-, 65-, or 80-inch display.

The same principles need to apply: establish a clear visual hierarchy, guide attention deliberately, remove distractions with objects aligned and distributed perfect on each slide and across slides. The slides should support the speaker, not compete with them.

Large-event work is also thinking in terms of moments rather than slides. Audiences don’t remember slide 37. They remember the moment they understood a concept, saw something unexpected, or connected with an idea. That’s true at a giant event with amazing staging and really-really big screens, and it’s just as true single-screen meeting or a laptop presentation.

The technology and scale may change, but good presentation design is still about helping presenters communicate clearly and helping the audience remember what matters.

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