Stephan shared some results from the world’s largest research on presentation software. Every four years, empower® conducts a study together with Nielsen, the biggest research firm in the world. It is a B2B representative study with more than 2000 office workers, which is focused on how presentation software is used by corporations.

This is one of the questions that were answered in the research that they have conducted.

Here are the five points Stephan shared as interesting insights from the study:

1. PowerPoint is still the clear market leader, but Google Slides is picking up.

2. 55% of office workers work regularly on presentations. And that 55% spend 7 hours per week on presentations.

3. From those 7 hours, 37% is spent on formatting their presentations. This is about 2.5 hours per week, where highly-paid and knowledgeable workers spend on making their slides look nice and brand-compliant.

4. When formatting the three biggest time-killers are: creating and formatting charts, searching for icons and templates, and transferring your presentation from old to a new design.

5. Nearly half, 47%, of presentations are not brand-compliant. And that is a number that has not changed in the last years.

Not being on-brand could mean using the wrong template, fonts, colors, or images. Most of the time it is all in one take altogether. This is alarming if you think about the importance of brands in today’s world. Companies are investing millions in building up and communicating their brand, and you use presentations in some of the most important aspects of brand communication – when the salesperson talks to the client, when the trainer educates your clients, or when you speak to an applicant who wants to join your company. It’s critical for them to be brand compliant and half of them are not.

People continue to spend a lot of time creating presentations and that trend is going up. It’s just increasingly important.

Stephan shared that his company is unable to fully maximize the time spent on thinking about your presentation’s storyline, but they can increase efficiency. What they do is to assist you in eliminating the 2.5 hours per week that you spend looking for things. If you are not in the brand department, brand conformity can be a cumbersome task, if you have to read a 100-page corporate design manual to find out things.

Empower® can support you from the technology side. Their software assists people in creating stunning presentations in less time while staying on brand.

Stephan did a live demo of the software they have created to give a sense of how it helps and saves time with branding. It’s a plug-in for Microsoft PowerPoint for Windows, and there is also a native Mac version. They also provide a solution for Web add-ins.

Empower® supports you from A to Z in the presentation creation process and is like creating a new presentation based on your current templates. One of the best features that save time is that when anyone launches PowerPoint the corporate design and template automatically opens up. You always start on brand and with the most recent template.

You see the agenda wizard that empower® has. You can swiftly create and adjust the agenda as it creates the agenda slides for you. Always in your corporate design. Moreover, if you have to update it, you no longer have to do it manually, as it is all automated by empower®.

You do not have to reinvent the wheel. Stephan shared that another finding in the research study was that roughly 80% of all presentations include slides from existing or older presentations. We reuse slides and their content a lot, and with empower®, you have a central slide library directly inside PowerPoint. You click on the library, and you can browse and add anything that you need.

The slide library is accessible to everyone in the organization. It’s synchronized and accessible when you are offline as well. You can use it whenever and wherever you want. You can also filter it by language, or any detail. Choose the slides you need and you are good to go on from there. All inside PowerPoint. Obtaining the content and other materials for your presentation is one of the biggest time-consuming tasks, and this saves you a ton of time.

empower® also provides amazing layout tools that go beyond what PowerPoint offers naturally. You can add another column to your charts, and it automatically adjusts. You can dynamically change your charts with the layout tools.

And then, empower® also has a handy digital asset management system that you can integrate with multiple platforms and have you browse and get all the content directly from it.

Last but not least, in the live demo, Stephan showed how intuitively empower® can update an old presentation to any new latest template.

Design check. When you’re done with your work, before you send it out, you hit the design check and be sure that everything is brand consistent. If not, it can auto-correct your template for you. Something that PowerPoint cannot do for you, but empower® can.

Magically, it converts to the new template, and it does it intelligently. If you had to do that manually, it’s 30 minutes of your life just for one presentation. If you have hundreds, you don’t even start doing that.