PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Story Business: Conversation with Gavin McMahon

  Gavin McMahon is a founder and Chief Content Officer for fassforward consulting group. He leads the design and product development of fassforward’s services. This crosses diverse topics, including Leadership, culture, decision-making, information design, storytelling, and learning design.

In this interview, Gavin talks about his new book, Story Business.

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Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Books, Gavin McMahon, Interviews, Stories

PowerPoint and Presenting News: July 21, 2026

Every presentation problem has a root cause. Most of the time, it’s structure. Jerry Weissman’s piece on writer’s block makes the case for starting with your goal, not your slides. The note on converting text boxes to placeholders tackles a structural problem that quietly undermines thousands of decks. And Peter Claus Lamprecht’s PPTX Toolkit interview goes deeper still, into the XML layer that governs how placeholders behave when layouts change. Three topics at different levels of depth, all pointing to the same truth: get the structure right first, and everything else follows.

Stay updated with the latest tutorials, tips, and news on PowerPoint and presentation techniques.

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

PPTX Toolkit: Conversation with Peter Claus Lamprecht

  Peter Claus Lamprecht is a presentation consultant based in Hamburg, Germany, with more than 37 years of experience. He helps self-employed professionals, sales and marketing teams, executives and consultants develop presentations that persuade and deliver results—from storyline to slide design to delivery. His specialty is PowerPoint slide masters, that work flawlessly on a technical level, implement the given design precisely and thus save time when working in PowerPoint. With the PPTX Toolkit, he is currently building a tool for direct access to the XML structure of PowerPoint files.

In this conversation, Peter talks about PPTX Toolkit.

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Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Add-in, Interviews, Peter Claus Lamprecht, PPTX Toolkit, Templates, XML

PowerPoint and Presenting News: July 7, 2026

This issue is about what happens when the right tool removes the friction. Ampler Charts takes the repetitive work out of building and updating business charts in PowerPoint, so you spend less time fixing visuals and more time using them. The KPIs article makes the case that performance indicators are far less intimidating than the acronym suggests. And AKVIS Retoucher AI 13 shows how AI can quietly restore damaged photographs without demanding expert skills. Three very different tools, one shared idea: the best technology gets out of your way.

Stay updated with the latest tutorials, tips, and news on PowerPoint and presentation techniques.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Breaking Through Writer’s Block – I

By Jerry Weissman

Writer’s block is the proverbial stuff of legend and literature. A variation on the theme is Limitless, a Hollywood film starring Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro. In it, Mr. Cooper plays a down-and-out writer who beats his severe case of writer’s block with a new drug that not only jump-starts his creative output, but gives him many other advanced mental capabilities. Of course, the story is fictional—A.O. Scott’s review of the film in the New York Times called it, “an energetic, enjoyably preposterous compound… a paranoid thriller blended with pseudo-neuro-science fiction and catalyzed by a jolting dose of satire”—but the situation is very real: writers do run dry.

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Filed Under: Guest Posts
Tagged as: Design, Guest Post, Jerry Weissman, Reuse Slides