In November’s Facebook Q&A we answered some interesting questions that you guys asked us. Below you can find a summary of them and how did Boris and Maria’s responses.
Question 1: How do you combine colors in slide design?
Answer: Great question! Overall it depends on the type of slides that we need to create. If the presentation is a corporate one, you need to stick to the corporate colors except if you are not told the opposite. Don’t forget that the colors are the face of the brand. If, however, you are allowed freedom then it may get really challenging for you to find the right way to combine them. One of the fastest and easiest ways is using an online platform (Adobe Color CC) that helps you build palettes that are harmonic and can be used in your slides.
! NB It’s important not to use too many colors in your slides! It’s best to use one leading color for the background, one for the text, and another one for accent (if needed at all). Overall, two or three colors is a good place to start. Especially if you are not a designer.
Question 2: What is the number of charts that you should use on a single slide and what type of financial data should you include?
Answer: It really depends if you need to use them for Slides or for Documents(the so-called “SlideDocs” in our industry)
You can come to our FREE seminar Slides vs SlideDocs and learn more about their differences and what’s important when you are creating the two types of presentations.
If you are making a live presentation – it’s not recommended to have many charts on your slides. In this scenario, it’s best to just use 1 per slide and have it so that it takes the whole slide. Don’t be afraid to have as many slides as you need in your presentation! The number of slides doesn’t matter!
As for the Document – the thing you send over e-mail, for example – we had customer cases where we created up to 6 charts on a slide. Again – it’s all about if you really need them all on one slide and if so, how to make them readable and easy to consume.
Tip: You can animate your charts and so that they are more appealing to your audience. Just click on your chart and go to Animations. Look at what happens next to the Animation options once you select one of them. You should see that the animation you selected is now customizable based on your chart. That will allow you to show your data pie by pie or one category after the other, etc.
Question 3: What do you think of the Crush animation?
Answer: Please. Don’t. Do. It.
OK, except if it doesn’t add value to your message. If that’s the case, please be our guest.
Question 4: How to convince our manager that we need to exclude certain slides from our presentation?
Answer: Communication. You need to explain that the slides are not about to add value to the presentation. You are going to be shocked how many managers will accept an idea like that if you just give them a good explanation and logical reason why to ditch the unnecessary slides.
Question 5: Should there be a summarizing slide at the end of our presentation?
Answer: A slide? Depends yet again. Not a bad idea. Especially, in the corporate. However, you can summarize your talk without a slide too. Again, just don’t forget that you only have to do a brief summary and not repeat your talk from the beginning.
Question 6: What do you think about the embed Fonts option and when it’s used by many people. Do you experience any problems with it?
Answer: The embed option in PowerPoint is a tricky one. Overall, it is hard for us to recommend it because many times it causes a ton of issues. The problem is not just that it does not work with every font, but even though it may seem that works with yours, you cannot be sure before you test it out. To add to that, some fonts can be embedded but when the other side opens the presentation, they cannot edit it. Yes, the font is embeddable but not editable. It’s a mess. Trust us.
Good News: If you are an Office 365 subscriber and the people that will consume your presentations are also using Microsoft service, then font embeddability is slightly better for both sides. Up until now, if you have a font that is embeddable, that works only on Windows. If you send it to a Mac person, it won’t work. Now, however, you can embed on Windows and consume on Mac and vice versa! That’s a really big step ahead (again – only Office 365 subscribers).
What’s more, Microsoft announced and implemented a feature called Cloud Fonts. That is a big one and could be a huge game-changer especially in the next few years because you now have some fonts that are “Cloud Fonts” and in case the people that get your presentation do not have that font, it will be automatically downloaded and then your presentation will be shown in the same way you prepared. Surprise again – only Office 365.
