PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

SlideTeam Presentation App: Conversation with Ajay Mohan

      Ajay Mohan is the Founder and CEO of SlideTeam. Before starting SlideTeam, Ajay Mohan held senior positions in Fortune 500 companies in the US including tech companies in Silicon Valley. He has done his Master of Business Administration (MBA), Finance from Indiana University Bloomington and Master of Science (MS), Engineering from Rutgers University-New Brunswick. His goal for SlideTeam is to bring a scientific approach to presenting complex ideas using well researched visual aids. SlideTeam.net and partner site SlideGeeks.com host a comprehensive and easily searchable collection with over 500,000 slides.

In this conversation, Ajay talks about the new SlideTeam Presentation App.

Geetesh: Ajay, can you tell us more about your SlideTeam Presentation app, and what motivated you to create it?

Ajay: Put very simply, the SlideTeam Presentation app converts sketches and notes into professional presentations. It is the first-ever app that allows presenters to take photos of their notes, drawings, and rough sketches from their mobile phones and send them to SlideTeam’s Custom Design Services team, one of the world’s best presentation design teams, and get a completely professional finished presentation back in 48 hours.

Our team of 150+ graphic designers, with over 10,000+ hours of PowerPoint experience, converts those sketches and notes into beautiful, polished presentations combining the best of graphics, editable diagrams, icons, and a customized template!

The increasing demand from our clients for a faster and easier way to request custom designs motivated us to launch this app. Even before the app was launched, our design services team had already designed thousands of winning presentations for Fortune 500 companies, marketing, and sales professionals, doctors, lawyers, and academia. Fortune 500 companies like General Motors, Boeing, Bank of America, Starbucks, Ford, General Electric, AT&T, CISCO, Colgate-Palmolive, and tech giants such as TCS, Infosys, Tech Mahindra, and leading IITs have been using our professional slides for their presentations.

During interaction over phone and email, several of our clients wished for a way that would make sharing their notes and design requirements as easy as a click of a button. Creating rough PowerPoint decks on their PCs and laptops was a hassle. Talk about taking pictures from whiteboards after a meeting. Since most of the clients preferred to stay in touch and work on the go using their phones and tablets, we devised a way that would drastically cut down the end-to-end process of crafting a winning presentation. And so the SlideTeam Presentation App was designed. The presenters now only need a pen and paper to jot down their ideas and their mobile phone to click those notes and send them via our app.

Geetesh: How does the app work, and what benefits will this bring to the end-user?

Ajay: The app is very easy to use as can be seen through these steps:

1. Simply sketch out your idea on paper and click it. Presenters can also send photos of their whitepapers, whiteboard notes, class notes, meeting notes, doodles or any other content.

The designers at SlideTeam take these rough sketches and notes and transform them into polished slides. Here’s one such professional slide created using clients’ brief:

Here are some benefits of SlideTeam App:

• Send notes and sketches from Android and iPhones with the click of a few buttons.
• Convert sketches and notes into crisp, professional presentations.
• Minimize time delay, get high quality presentations in 48 hours or less.
• Submit requests for complete PPTs, slides, diagrams, logos, 3D graphics, etc.
• Free to use and no sign in/sign up required.

Here are links to download the SlideTeam Presentation App from the Apple AppStore and the Google Play Store:

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.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Interviews, PowerPoint, Presentation Samples, SlideGeeks, SlideTeam

PowerPoint and Presenting News: February 23, 2016

Nancy Duarte has written a new book, Illuminate and she speaks exclusively in this interview with Indezine. We then explore ten sites that provide free icons. Robert Kawalsky then discusses the amazing new features on Zeetings, his presentation sharing and viewing platform. We updated our Evolution of Office Themes article to include content relevant to the new PowerPoint 2016. And then Georg Kremer talks about Slideflight.

PowerPoint 2016 for Windows users can learn about reusing and inserting slides; and about changing backgrounds in the Slide Master. PowerPoint 2013 for Windows users can learn about creating new files with a hyperlink! PowerPoint 2016 for Mac can better understand why there is no Developer tab in their version. Finally, do not miss the new discussions and templates of this week!

Read Indezine’s PowerPoint and Presenting News.

Filed Under: Ezine
Tagged as: Ezine, Indezine, News, PowerPoint

Create a Hyperlink to a New Email Message in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows

We already explored how you can link from an anchor object to any slide within the active presentation. However, this sort of linking is only the beginning of the possibilities for linking that PowerPoint 2013 for Windows provides. To take this to the next level, we will learn how you can link from an anchor object to create a new email message.

Learn how you can create a new email message with a hyperlink in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2013
Tagged as: Email, Hyperlinking, Microsoft Windows, Office 2013, PowerPoint 2013, Tutorials

Slide Layouts within Slide Master View in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

While changing the Slide Layout of any given slide(s) in PowerPoint 2016, you typically access the Home tab of the Ribbon and click the Layout button. This brings forth the Layout drop-down gallery. The number of Slide Layouts that you see within this gallery may differ depending upon the Theme of your active presentation. However, with PowerPoint’s default Office Theme applied, you may see 9 layouts.

Explore Slide Layouts within Slide Master view in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2016
Tagged as: Microsoft Windows, Office 2016, PowerPoint 2016, Slide Layouts, Slide Master View, Slide Masters, Templates, Themes, Tutorials

Illuminate: Conversation with Patti Sanchez

    Patti Sanchez is a communicator with nearly 25 years of experience leading transformative marketing initiatives for brands and causes, and the co-author of Illuminate: Ignite Change Through Speeches, Stories, Ceremonies, and Symbols. As Chief Strategy Officer for Duarte, Inc., Patti facilitates workshops and counsels clients on how to create authentic connections with their audiences through persuasive presentations.

In this conversation, Patti talks about Illuminate.

Geetesh: Patti, tell us more about the experience of writing Illuminate. And how do you believe that reading Illuminate will help others?

Patti: Nancy and I complement each other really well: she’s the visionary and I’m the empath. She envisions where we need to be in the future, and I anticipate what it will feel like for people to go there. When we set out to write Illuminate, we combined these two passions of ours to help leaders navigate the monumental task of getting their people on board to undergo and bring about major change.

Anyone in the role of change-maker in some way knows that effectively communicating is vital to the success of a venture. After decades of helping leaders communicate well during high-stakes moments, we know the power of the spoken word. But we also know that communicating well in one moment isn’t enough to drive the adoption of truly bold and transformative ideas. We wrote Illuminate to fully support today’s leaders at every stage of their change journey, including the good times and the bad times, the victories and the failures, the moments to be proud, and the moments to be humble. Each of these moments is an opportunity to bring people closer together and embolden them to see their venture through to a successful conclusion.

Geetesh: Do you want to share an experience about an influence, a response, or anything else that happened while writing this book? And how did that make a difference?

Patti: Writing Illuminate was very meta – we found that we were applying the principles and models to our own company. As we wrote the book, our company went through an internal restructuring that disrupted nearly every role in the organization, all while business was booming and our people were already stretched thin. So we imagined how our people would feel as the new future of Duarte, Inc., would play out in their daily lives. We asked ourselves what we should say, show, and do to make the transition less challenging and more exciting. In other words, we took our own medicine!

So Illuminate‘s readers should know that we were testing the book’s ideas at the very time we were developing them, applying our models to our own business, and refining our ideas. The result of all of this is a book with a methodology rooted in real-life situations and examples that can guide readers through their own change communication challenges.

You May Also Like: Illuminate: Conversation with Nancy Duarte

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.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Books, Duarte Design, Interviews, Nancy Duarte, Patti Sanchez, PowerPoint, Presentation Skills