PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Pitch It!: Conversation with Jan Schultink

    After a career of 10 years as management consultant with McKinsey & Company in Amsterdam and London, Jan Schultink now is the Founder and CEO of Idea Transplant, a presentation design firm that creates sales, conference, and investor presentations. He is based in Tel Aviv but serves clients all over the globe.

In this conversation, Jan discusses his new e-book, Pitch It!

Geetesh: Tell us about what motivated you to write Pitch It! Also, how would a book like this have helped you 10 years ago?

Jan: As a professional presentation designer I have been writing short daily blog posts with suggestions how to design better presentations. The blog is not very structured: whatever comes to mind in the morning becomes that day’s post. As a result, it is not that easy to search the archive with 4 years’ worth of posts. The idea for the book was to take all that content and put it in a logical and consistent flow.

Personally, I went through this transition from a management consultant at McKinsey (still hand-scribbling exhibits that had to be produced by graphics designers) to a professional presentation designer. If I had a book like this in my hands 10 years ago, that transition would have taken place much faster!

Geetesh: What sets Pitch It! apart from other books that discuss presentation design skills?

Jan: Presentation design books usually start from the design/story writing angle: why bullet point slides are bad, how to structure a story, the basics of graphics design. I started from the end product: a sales or investor presentation, the most common type of high-stake presentations in business and worked my way backwards. The result is a highly practical book that assumes that you already are convinced that bullets points are bad, you just want very specific suggestions on how to design better presentations. When I design presentations for my clients, I pretty much follow the exact approach that is highlighted in the book.

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, Interviews, Jan Schultink, Opinion, Presentation Skills

Handmade Slides: Pushpins for PowerPoint – 06

Continuing our pushpin series, this set of pushpins looks a little different — in fact these pushpins look akin to map pins, just larger! If you need to use any of these ready-made pushpin graphics on your slides, then all you need to do is download the files. These pushpin graphics are made available in five colors within the downloaded PowerPoint slides. Just copy them and paste them on the edges of pictures in your presentation. Use these pushpin graphics on your slides to create a look that makes a picture, shape, or anything else appear as if it has been pushed onto a surface, notice-board, or wall with a pin! Have fun, and enjoy using these pushpins!

Download and use these pushpins in your slides.

Filed Under: Presentation Bank
Tagged as: Design, Graphics, PowerPoint, Presentation Samples

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Insert Video (Movie) Clips

Why would you want to add a video clip within a PowerPoint slide? There are plenty of wrong reasons, and a few good ones — let us explore the good reasons and then show you how you can add a video clip to your slide in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac. Here are some good reasons.

Learn how to insert a video (movie) clip in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2011
Tagged as: Movies, Office for Mac, PowerPoint 2011, Tutorials, Video

Learn PowerPoint 2013 for Windows: Guides

Like Gridlines, Guides also allow you to position and snap your slide objects in place. When guides are enabled for the first time within PowerPoint, you can just see two guides by default. These guides are two dotted lines, one horizontal and the other vertical. They span to intersect exactly at the center of the slide.

Learn about viewing and hiding Guides in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2013
Tagged as: PowerPoint 2013, Tutorials

Handmade Slides: Pushpins for PowerPoint – 05

More pushpin graphics for your slides! These ready-made pushpin graphics are so easy to use since they are already placed within the presentation you will download. You’ll find them in five colors — just copy them from the downloaded slide and paste on your own slides! These pushpins make your pictures, shapes, or anything else appear as if they have been pushed onto a surface, notice-board, or wall with a pin!

Download and use these pushpins in your slides.

Filed Under: Presentation Bank
Tagged as: Design, Graphics, PowerPoint, Presentation Samples