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Build Amazing PowerPoint Templates with Julie Terberg & Echo Swinford
338 Plays2 years ago
Julie Terberg is the founder of Terberg Design, a creative studio focused on crafting presentations that better communicate with audiences.
With decades of experience in the presentation industry, Julie has trusted partnerships with other presentation professionals and valued clients around the world.
Since 2005, she has been recognized as a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP for her contributions to the presentation community. Julie enjoys teaching others at industry conferences, including the Presentation Summit and the Present to Succeed conference. She served as a founding director of the Presentation Guild and cohost of the Inspired by Design webinar series, exclusively for Guild members.
A Microsoft PowerPoint MVP since 2000, Echo Swinford began her PowerPoint career in 1997. She holds a master’s degree in new media from Indiana University and is the owner of Echosvoice, a PowerPoint consulting firm specializing in custom template development, presentation creation, makeovers and cleanup, and training for large and small corporate clients.
Echo has written and co-written five PowerPoint books, developed a number of video publications, and has a string of tech editing credits to her name. With co-author Julie Terberg, she recently released the definitive guide to PowerPoint template development: Building PowerPoint Templates v2.
Echo is President Emerita of the Presentation Guild, a not-for-profit trade association for the presentation industry which she founded in 2015. Visit Echo’s Web site at www.echosvoice.com.
Julie and Echo’s new book, Building PowerPoint Templates, version 2, is available on Amazon.
Episode Notes
Julie Terberg | Website | Twitter | LinkedIn
Echo Swinford | Website | Twitter | LinkedIn
A Guide to Cloud Fonts in Microsoft Office 365 (Updated April 2022)
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Transcript
Introduction to PowerPoint Templates
00:00:13
Speaker
Welcome back to the policy of his podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabish. On this week's episode of the show, we're going to learn how to create great effective templates in PowerPoint with my guests, Julie Turberg and Echo Swinford. I've known Julie and Echo for several years now. First met them at the presentation summit, which is an annual conference held for folks who are working in the presentation field. Echo and Julie have the best, I'm not even saying it's arguably, it is the best book on how to build
The Evolution of Julie and Echo's Book
00:00:43
Speaker
better templates in PowerPoint. And the first edition of the book was really hard to get. Unfortunately, I have a version of that book here somewhere buried in my office, but they now have a new edition of the book, which incorporates some of the new modules and features of the modern version of PowerPoint. So if you work for an organization,
00:01:02
Speaker
where you and your colleagues are creating PowerPoint presentations, delivering PowerPoint presentations, maybe even creating documents or reports in PowerPoint. I really encourage you to listen to this episode and I encourage you to check out their new book on PowerPoint templates. So here we go. Here's my discussion with Julian Echo about creating better PowerPoint templates.
00:01:26
Speaker
All right. We're here yet another podcast virtually.
Navigating New PowerPoint Features
00:01:30
Speaker
Great. Uh, echo, Julie, how are you both? Good. Great to see you again. I haven't seen you in like quite a few years, years since the before times. Yeah. It might've been New Orleans in the last, uh, presentations. Yeah. That was a while ago. Good to see you, John. Yeah.
00:01:47
Speaker
It's good to see you. So congrats on the new book. Now, I don't know how many people know this, but I want you to sort of lay out what the story is here because the first book is like a rare jewel at this point, like getting a copy of the first edition is like holding on to gold. And now we have a new updated version.
00:02:11
Speaker
So tell me the story or tell listeners the story of like, how you went from the first book, and now in now getting to the second book. I don't know, Julie, if you want to start. Oh, sure. The first one, we worked with a publisher. And, and we, you know, we sold, we sold some books, but it is a very niche market. And so we're not going to sell, you know, thousands and thousands upon thousands for years. And so the publisher decided they weren't going to print anymore, right?
00:02:40
Speaker
So then the book became very expensive. And the book market used my presentation copy of the book for $4,000 on Amazon. And I don't think they had any takers for a minute. But anyway, that
Do Templates Restrict Creativity?
00:02:57
Speaker
was a long time ago. And so Echo and I have been waiting for a few developments with the software.
00:03:03
Speaker
and changes that impacted templates. That was the catalyst for this updated version. Now we've got this updated version. I want to ask about templates generally. I've seen some people complain about templates that there's lots of websites out there where you can download this template and this template, but your book focuses on building a custom,
00:03:30
Speaker
entire template for your individual organization. Some people argue that they take away this idea of creativity. Can you talk a little bit about the advantages and disadvantages of having, in this case, a PowerPoint template and maybe, I don't know, Echo, if you want to start? Yeah.
00:03:45
Speaker
Yeah, I'll start. So my opinion, and I think you'll probably agree, is that a template is there to provide an infrastructure for you. Like what you want to do, like people in your organization, it lets them create their content without a whole lot of effort, because you've got the font theme built in, you've got the color theme built in. And so things just work.
00:04:07
Speaker
But it also helps non-designers create consistency throughout a deck. And that's something that is difficult for them because when they look at a blank slide, like most normal people like me, you look at a blank slide and it's intimidating. But, you know, to someone like Julie, a designer, they know what to do with that.
00:04:24
Speaker
So that's what a template is for. It's not there to take care of every situation or anything like that. It's just really to give you that infrastructure so you don't have to do everything manually. Folks who say that a template curtails creativity, they really need to understand that even if you're working on a blank template in PowerPoint, it's still based on a template. It still has those ugly office colors and the Calibri fonts. And so anything you design on that blank template, we've seen them all before.
00:04:54
Speaker
I can recognize the office theme orange and blue, you know, at a glance in HTML in hex code. But a template.
00:05:04
Speaker
If you're creative and you're working with a template, you can go beyond those basic layouts and you can use the color theme and the font theme and the structure and design a new configuration that goes along with everything else. So everything's consistent. That's all a template really is, is developing that structure for design consistency.
00:05:27
Speaker
The one thing I've learned from both of you many years ago was using not just the slide in PowerPoint, and we're focused on PowerPoint, but this probably extends to most of
Embedding Instructions in Templates
00:05:38
Speaker
these tools. Not just the white slide itself, but using the notes pane and using the gray area around it. When you build out these templates or when a person builds out a template for their organization,
00:05:51
Speaker
Can you talk a little bit about building in the instruction into sort of how to use it within the template itself? Yeah, Echo, go ahead.
00:06:02
Speaker
Yeah, so what you're doing there when you're building in instructions, well, like you said, you're using all of the different places. But the thing is that PowerPoint doesn't give us a really good way to build in instructions for the users. So what we've done throughout the years is, honestly, we've hacked PowerPoint and we've just pushed it and used all the different features that we have available to add instructions wherever we can. Like one of the easiest things to do is to customize the prompt text. But people don't realize that you can do that.
00:06:30
Speaker
And it does have limitations, but you can still get a lot of really good information in there for people. And it's just anything that you can do to help those users understand what kind of information to put in. A lot of folks at these big companies, hey, believe it or not, they don't use PowerPoint every day.
00:06:52
Speaker
So they may pull up this template, you know, after a few weeks or a month or a couple months, and they need to refamiliarize themselves with the tools and how to use it and anything that we can do in the template to make their job quicker and easier. That's what we're trying to do.
00:07:09
Speaker
Yeah. It just seems to me, I think you're both right on. It seems to me that a lot of people in whatever field it is, presentation design, date of is, whatever it is, sort of forget that, you know, most people that we work with don't really care all that much. They're like, they just want to kind of look good, right? Yeah. And make it easy as possible for me. Yeah. And oh, I was going to tell you, I got something out of there. Nothing.
00:07:36
Speaker
Well, you said something, John, in the beginning about there are all kinds of templates that you can download and things like that. And you're right. People just want stuff to look good. So they look at those templates and they download them.
The Role of Templates in Branding
00:07:48
Speaker
Those templates don't necessarily help you make your stuff look good in your branding because it's all built at the slide level. It's not got that infrastructure in there. And it drives you crazy. Hey, I've downloaded. I've purchased some. I've downloaded most of them.
00:08:03
Speaker
you're missing so many parts and pieces a lot of them they've stripped off the slide master they don't have any fonts programmed in you know they're not saving you any time or
00:08:14
Speaker
doing it. It's just that it's just a one off, right? It's like the one off thing that I need. It's like a one off thing. Yeah, right. But doesn't help you down the road the way having it inside the organization. So you know, you're the database expert here. So then they have those charts that have like, what are they? What do we call them? Do you have graphs? Like that doesn't work for anything. And like, how do you do that with your data? Have you ever seen the one with histogram line? The tree is instead of columns, the overlapping trees.
00:08:43
Speaker
Oh yeah, the trees, the 3D bar charts that have no data. They're just like, they're just decorative. They're just decorative, right? Yeah. So you can download a bunch of decorative stuff, but does it really help you in your day to day and what you're doing, you know, when you're trying to create charts and yeah, anyway.
00:09:02
Speaker
No, no, I think that's right. I want to get back to that in a second because I want to ask about, my sense is that a lot of people that I talk to, when they start thinking about their template, they think about font and color.
00:09:17
Speaker
And they sort of get that. And then they think about, OK, so how am I going to get to the next step or do the template for every type of slide? And they sort of get stuck there. So I want to ask, this is really a two-part question, I think, now because of Echo, which you just said. So I guess the first question is, what's your recommendation for those folks who maybe get
00:09:41
Speaker
stuck aside from reading the book, obviously, like that would be the first things read the book. But aside from like, like, what's, what's the way that they can get over the hump?
Practical vs Designer-Focused Templates
00:09:50
Speaker
And then to this question of like, not doing this, like downloading this one off slide, like, how do you think when you're working with clients on this, like return on investment on, you're going to spend some time building the template and how much you're going to get out of it at the end of the day. So that's kind of a two parter. So I don't know if Julie, you reply first, please.
00:10:13
Speaker
Honestly John, I would just be happy if they would get the fonts and the colors right.
00:10:22
Speaker
You know, a template isn't going to fix all presentation problems. It's not going to. And you can't address every single potential slide configuration in your template. Have you ever seen a template and you open up the layouts gallery and there's about a hundred of them and you have to scroll through and then, oh, and you're also working with those 50, 60, 70 megabyte templates. And so no one can email any files along the company.
00:10:47
Speaker
So that's what happens when you try and address everybody's issue. You just can't, and you shouldn't. In fact, our book addresses this, talking about a small template in a larger supplemental slide library, right? But what a template should do is it should work for everyone who's going to use it. So what we recommend is you take a look at a whole bunch of recent presentations that are done by your audience, and you surface those common slide types.
00:11:16
Speaker
What types of slides are the people who are going to be using your new template using? That's what goes in your template. You need to do your homework first before you design, before you build anything. Do your homework and design the template for those people, not for you.
00:11:33
Speaker
And if you found when you work with clients that people, once they sort of see the value of the template, it just like the adoption just sort of like picks up pretty quickly. Yeah. Yeah, it definitely does. I have a client right now who I was contacted to rebuild their template because their design agency gave them a, basically a not workable template.
00:11:57
Speaker
And one of the issues is that they built it and they did their designer ish layouts is what I call them. So they're really cool. They have really cool quotes and they have stuff like this. This is an engineering firm. Okay. So all the engineers have come to these people and said, where are our layouts? Cause they had.
00:12:14
Speaker
They had a really good template to start with. Julie actually built and designed and built the previous one that was from years and years ago, and they need to update it while the agency took off with it and did crazy things. And the client has come back because the engineers are complaining because they don't have any layouts that they can use. They didn't take their audience in mind at all. They just did them dirty.
00:12:33
Speaker
Right. They did a movie. I mean, it's just, I think that that's one of the big drawbacks when people are creating templates. They forget about who's going to be using them. They build a template for themselves, not for the end users and for the people who are stuck. And like you said, how many templates do we receive that are filled with that eye candy stuff? Seriously, John, how many quotes can you have in a presentation?
00:13:01
Speaker
Yeah, no, I think that's right. And I think it comes back to what people see on a lot of these, not that these sites are bad, where you can download, not that they're bad, I'm just saying, you see these things are sort of eye catching.
00:13:14
Speaker
And then you say, well, I'm going to put that in my thing. But yeah, like you said, how many different ways do you need to lay out a quote in a single deck? I wanted to extend this conversation just a little bit because I was talking to a student yesterday. And one of the big things that they have to do is they do slide decks at their work. But the slide decks are primarily intended to be shared as documents, not as a presentation. So that's sort of the way they go. So how do the templates
00:13:42
Speaker
work for those folks. How do you think about that?
PowerPoint as a Document Creator
00:13:47
Speaker
To be honest, I don't exactly know how this works, why you would use PowerPoint as a document creator, but okay, fine, whatever works. Yeah. A lot of our clients will request multiple templates, one for presentations and one for documents. Other clients will ask us to include a few custom layouts that are designed for that purpose.
00:14:09
Speaker
text heavy, they're just going to take those slides and export a PDF and deliver that as a leave behind. And so you can include them in the template or if you need more looks, distribute a second template that's for documents. Some of our clients don't do presentations, they only do proposals or documents and reports. And PowerPoint gives them way more flexibility than Word does.
00:14:35
Speaker
Well, you mean, uh, hold minds together is not useful. Sorry, go ahead. Sorry. Sorry. I didn't mean it, but they don't have access to a design necessarily. So they're using PowerPoint as their, um, page layout tool. They don't know. I don't even know if Microsoft makes publisher anymore.
00:14:54
Speaker
But yeah, InDesign, this Quark exists. I mean, InDesign's the only thing I can even think of. It's a page layout tool anymore. And people don't have access to it. And the learning curve is big for a typical person who would be using PowerPoint. So yeah, it's the de facto page layout.
00:15:11
Speaker
We do reporting templates like Julie was saying, we do those all the time for our consulting firm clients. And I've done newsletter templates for a couple of my clients. Proposal templates. Right. Yeah. The other thing I do is participant guides and then you take it into Acrobat and you add editable text fields for the audience so they don't have to print anything.
00:15:39
Speaker
Right. So this is a very specific question, but it's something that comes up. I get this question a lot.
00:15:46
Speaker
So I'm just going to, I'm going to tap into the PowerPoint dollars before we get back to templates. So, uh, I have a lot of people who, who they lay out, they want to do a document. So they lay out their slide eight and a half by 11, and then they're going to burn it out as a PDF. So some people will come to me and say, well, I've built in my one inch margins in the slide itself before burning it out to a PDF. And some say, well, I don't need to do that because when I convert it, it's going to add the margins in, or when I print it, if they're printing, it's going to build it.
00:16:15
Speaker
So what's your approach to that? I can tell you what I do. I set up the page size for eight and a half by 11 and I export a PDF and it's a hundred percent eight and a half by 11.
00:16:28
Speaker
and do you build in the margins, the one inch margins in PowerPoint or let the conversion? When you say one inch margins, that sounds like it's for a specific purpose. The margins that I use are specific to whatever document I'm creating. Do whatever. And they use guides. You're using guides and placeholder positioning. Don't think about margins like Word. PowerPoint's not going to push everything inside of a set margin like Word can.
00:16:57
Speaker
So you have to set up your elements in that within the frame. What I would say is, so a couple of things with setting up margins and pages. When you set up your page in PowerPoint, if you choose letter, US letter, it's actually, it already adds an inch. It makes your page size an inch smaller all the way around. So you have to use a custom size and set up eight and a half by 11 specifically to get that eight and a half by 11 file.
00:17:26
Speaker
So once you have that, then like Julie said, put your guides in to set your margins. But honestly, I would recommend exporting a PDF and looking at it to see because there are different settings that you can put in your print settings and your PDF settings. And depending on how you're creating your PDF, it may add more margin than not. So run a test to see if it looks right to your eye.
00:17:51
Speaker
So that leads me to another question. When you're working with a client and you're building a template for them or you're teaching them how to make templates, do you encourage them or do you test with multiple people at the organization?
Testing and Customizing Templates
00:18:04
Speaker
Do you encourage them to test it? And like, what does that look like? Are you like, here's the deck go, you know, here's the template, go make a deck. Or like, what does that, what does that process look like?
00:18:13
Speaker
Well, yeah, so generally speaking, we build in a couple of weeks for testing in the timeline. So Julie will do design. We get, we get our feedback. We, you know, whatever we build it, we build a template. And then when I build it, the first draft, it's solid. They could use it. They could roll it out.
00:18:30
Speaker
but I asked them to test with a small group. So they should pick, you know, five or 10 people. They should probably have some people who are really super savvy and they should probably have some people who are not. And then have them test that template, build slides with that template, see what works for them, see what doesn't. And then we'll sometimes give them a list of things to check specifically. Like make sure that when you add text here, like
00:18:53
Speaker
Do you want it to shrink the text? If you want that to behave differently, let us know. Does this color work for you on the background? That kind of thing. Usually, I've found it's a little bit easier. Folks really think they know a lot about PowerPoint, but they don't.
00:19:09
Speaker
And so the last few clients, I've distributed the how-to guide that's a companion to the template and maybe a template system with a big library. And it has instructions in there for how to get this from here to here, but also how to up-level older presentations by copying content into the new template. If you miss a few of those pieces during the testing phase, all your feedback is going to be, well, this doesn't work with my old slides.
00:19:38
Speaker
Right? So you've both been doing this for a while. Are you still seeing people moving from 4-3 to 16-9? Or have we sort of like
00:19:50
Speaker
kind of finally gotten to the widescreen and we're kind of there. I think we're over the home. I saw one a couple of days ago and I was like, really? We're still doing fine. I do have a lot of clients who still do for three and they are the ones who are doing reporting. They are printing. They're specifically still printing, physically printing. Now most of them are creating PDFs as well, but especially the financial firms, they are like, they just, their heads are in that four by three space. And sometimes I can't get them out of it.
00:20:19
Speaker
but a lot of them are also asking for a 16 by 9 option as well. I think they're going to find that moving back and forth really sucks and they're eventually going to settle on widescreen. That's my guess.
00:20:34
Speaker
It would be interesting without the pandemic if that would have accelerated even faster. Because it's almost like when you're on Zoom, it almost doesn't matter because you can adjust your Zoom screen. You can still see it. But when you're in the real world and you're presenting, it's all widescreen TV. Except you've got folks who are using their iPads more and more, and those are 4 by 3. Some laptop screens are 4 by 3.
00:21:02
Speaker
I think the pandemic revealed that we still have a need for both now and then. I don't see any, I think I've seen one four by three come across in the last year.
00:21:15
Speaker
That's interesting about the iPad. I haven't thought about that. Yeah, that's true. That's really interesting. You're not going to think of like four or five clients I have right now who are doing four by three in the last couple of months, but it's a lot of financial and reporting. Yeah, okay. But it's sort of a unique use case.
00:21:32
Speaker
Okay, so specifically to templates, and I'm going to let you each answer, see if we get different answers. I should have had you write it down first. What's your number one rule or recommendation when it comes to not using but creating the template? So if I'm the head designer at my firm, I'm creating the template. What's your number one rule? So Julie, you want to go first? Like what's your number one rule? Do not.
00:21:57
Speaker
do not add or remove placeholders from any of the default layouts in PowerPoint. When you go to the Slide Master View, those nine layouts that show up first, don't add or remove any placeholders from those. If you need something that has an additional placeholder, or maybe you wanted to delete one or whatever, always go in and insert a brand new custom layout and add placeholders to that. You can have them match the look of your existing placeholders.
00:22:27
Speaker
But don't add or remove any from those default ones. It breaks the connection between existing templates and your new templates. Yeah. Yeah, that's really good. Yeah. All right. Echo, number one rule recommendation. So I have two. The first one is you should save as a template, an actual true template. So by that we mean save as POTX.
00:22:52
Speaker
at least once while you're creating your template. That strips out those variants. So if you do change slide size or if you click one of those by mistake, it won't override all of your custom formatting because I've seen people just lose everything that they've worked on when you switch slide size. So you have to strip those variants and saving as POTX does that. After you save the files POTX, you can save it as a PPTX later and use the PPTX for distribution or whatever, but that save as POTX function
00:23:23
Speaker
breaks that connection and you want to break that connection in that. So it's an important thing that gets overlooked because it just.
00:23:30
Speaker
came into fruition, maybe in like, yeah, I think we, I think we put it in 36 point text in the book. Like we repeated it every three pages or something, like save as PODX. Just do it once. Like, just trust me. Just do it once. But the other thing honestly is set up your font theme. People do not know to set up the font theme and what you're doing when you do that, like they'll, they'll apply a font to the placeholders, but they won't set up the font theme.
00:23:57
Speaker
And what you're doing is you're setting up all of your users to create Frank index at that point, because your placeholders when you type text will use whatever you've formatted there, but everything else uses the font theme. So when you create a chart or a smart art or a table, you use the font theme. Yeah.
00:24:15
Speaker
And so if they don't match, like people can't see the difference between those fonts. If you have Colibri as your font theme and you've put Arial on your placeholders, most people can't see that difference. Julie can see it at a glance, but I don't pay attention to it a lot of times. And so you'll get caught out with that and you'll end up with all these mismatched fonts. And also, as we've discovered recently, some of those fonts are nearly impossible to replace in charts.
00:24:44
Speaker
So you're just doing everyone as a service. So take a few minutes and set up the font theme. Yeah, that's good. Okay. Great. All right. So now I want to ask about PowerPoint specifically because it has, the tool has evolved pretty dramatically over the last, what, five years, I'd say, probably.
Favorite and Least Favorite PowerPoint Features
00:25:06
Speaker
Um, so I want to get your sense of your least favorite part of PowerPoint and your, and your most favorite part of PowerPoint. So we'll go, maybe we'll, we'll go backwards this time. So we'll start with echo. So your, your least and most favorite part of, I don't know what I mean by part, to be honest, like I guess specific.
00:25:25
Speaker
tool part aspect. My least favorite thing, my least favorite thing about PowerPoint. I mean, okay. So I have to say I, I love PowerPoint. There's so much good about it. I got to throw that out there, but there are so many like little things that just drive me batshit. I can't even, some things just make me crazy. But honestly, the biggest thing and the biggest time suck, I think are the charting and table tools.
00:25:53
Speaker
I think they suck. They suck really bad. I think the fact that we cannot create our own custom styles for charts and tables is just, I just, oh my God, they need love so bad. It's just low hanging fruit. I don't know why they haven't done anything with them. The tables are embarrassing.
00:26:12
Speaker
They're just embarrassing. They are embarrassing, yeah. That is the best word to describe them. It's actually interesting now that you, I hadn't really thought about this, but it's the charting library in Illustrator is also like god-awful. So like what, like, I don't know, I don't know what to say about that, but you know. So I, when I have to work from PowerPoint to Illustrator and InDesign,
00:26:37
Speaker
Every chart is manually manipulated so that it's exacting, brought into Illustrator, converted for InDesign, and it's a lot more work. But I can take advantage of chart styles for some of that.
00:26:54
Speaker
We can't create an actual chart style of it with travel with a template and we can't like, there's no one click like add direct labeling. Like what the hell Microsoft? Come on, low hanging fruit. I can't even position those data labels properly. I mean, it's just, oh, it's so bad. It's infuriating. It is infuriating. That is a good word for it. Yeah, it really is. I mean, I will say it's gotten better. Like I was very much like,
00:27:20
Speaker
Well, no, I was up until maybe three years ago, I was like, I will never insert a chart directly in PowerPoint. I would always make it in Excel and then pipe it over because the PowerPoint Excel handoff was always so bad. It just seems to have gotten like a handoff is better now. But it's still like all these other things you can't.
00:27:42
Speaker
Yeah, honestly, but John, it doesn't matter whether you're doing it in PowerPoint or in Excel, because quite frankly, the only the biggest difference I would say is that PowerPoint starts with dummy data. And that's actually one of the tips that I give my students is if you don't know how a chart is supposed to have the data should be set up, do it in PowerPoint.
00:28:01
Speaker
Because it gives you the dummy data. So for example, tree map. I have no idea what Excel is looking for for a tree map. And so if I create it in PowerPoint, I have dummy data. I'm like, oh, and then I can go to Excel and set it up that way if I need to.
00:28:15
Speaker
Or I can create it in PowerPoint using that dummy data because you can click the button and open the full Excel thing. So you have all the Excel tools right there. Just people don't know to do that. Yeah. So I don't care if I'm turning in PowerPoint or Excel, to be honest, because to me, it's really the same. It's just that I don't have to add the data. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's a really good idea.
00:28:38
Speaker
Okay, Julie, least and most favorite part. The least favorite, the text formatting tools from hell. You don't like the drop down on the outline and the bubble? No, not that text formatting. The ancient dialogue boxes for line and paragraph spacing and bullet characters and numbering and all that. They're so bad and so old and they really don't help us at all with presentation text.
00:29:08
Speaker
They didn't even help in Word, they don't help in PowerPoint. That's my least favorite area of the program, and I have to use it every single day. I have to throw in one. Go ahead. Go on, Jules. I'm sorry. I thought you were finished.
00:29:27
Speaker
All right, so one other for me related to templates specifically is the whole template ecosystem is what I will call it. I think that things like font themes and color themes, they're not real obvious to people. It's not obvious what's happening to them, but also it's really, really difficult to get to your custom template. If you don't want to use a Microsoft stock theme, you got to jump through some hoops.
00:29:54
Speaker
I mean, IT can strip out all of that stuff. Your IT staff can strip that out and can push yours and all of that. It's really hard for them to do and they don't know how to do it. And if you're a small, very small firm, you may not have someone doing that kind of thing. So it shouldn't be that hard. It should be so much more obvious and so much more easy.
00:30:14
Speaker
I 100% agree with that. That is one of the biggest hiccups I have to getting people to even just to make a color palette in Excel and share it with their, with their colleagues. Like you have to go like seven layers deep into your, into your finder Explorer window to find that XML file. It's just, it's unwell. I mean, I don't, yeah, beyond my skillset to know whether it's unnecessarily difficult, but it's definitely difficult. So it is difficult. Yeah. So you asked also about our favorite.
00:30:43
Speaker
favorite recently, last couple years, the cloud fonts, Microsoft cloud fonts. As a designer, I mean, it's I've been waiting for this forever. And
00:30:55
Speaker
There's hundreds of new fonts and so many of them will make beautiful presentation theme fonts. But the coolest thing is more and more, I think all of my clients right now are in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. So they can use these cloud fonts in their files and no one needs to embed them or install them.
00:31:16
Speaker
they are automatically downloaded from the Cloud whenever someone opens up a document with these fonts. So anyway, seeing more and more global uptick on the M365 users, and so Cloud Fonts is probably my favorite new feature.
00:31:35
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah. And I think, uh, I just saw Nolan Hames posted a link to someone has a new guy and it was lovely. Well, that's yours. Okay. Perfect. And it's like, what, like 300 pages? Uh, it has a visual example of all of the cloud fonts and it's constantly updated as the, as Microsoft adds new fonts to the service. I update the guide and post a new one.
00:32:04
Speaker
It's also linked from Microsoft's Cloud font page. So if you're on their page, it links to my site so you can access the guide that way. But it's on Design to Present on the publications page. Yeah, I have it right here on my desktop. I'll link to that so people can grab it, because it's excellent. If they don't know what Cloud fonts are, the site has an article explaining what you need to know.
00:32:31
Speaker
and the caveats also. If you're gonna have folks using Office versions, if you don't know what Office versions they're on, you need to be aware of some of these issues. Right, right. Echo, I don't think we got a chance of your favorite. Favorite. So I was thinking about this, and I kind of have a love-hate relationship with designer, but it's another one of those non-obvious things. Sometimes,
00:32:59
Speaker
I really like being able to just, especially with my clients and stuff, they can just choose one of those designer things and you can up level your slide and it's really good for one off. My issue with it is it has some issues and so it's sometimes hard to get back to the design and people don't know how to use one of those designer options for the whole file. And if you insert it in a new slide, like if you're creating a title slide with a new deck and you do a designer thing,
00:33:27
Speaker
You choose a designer look, it will apply to the whole deck, but it's not obvious that it's doing that. So I struggle with that obviousness and things like that. But on the positive side, if you construct your template correctly, it will work with designer and designer will push the layouts that you are using in brand in your template. Your users can. Yeah. So the users can select those in brand. Yeah, that's great. On brand.
00:33:53
Speaker
So I kind of, you know, I got to give designer a shout out. They've done a nice job with it. I mean, I feel the same way. I kind of like it, especially when it's quick and dirty. Um, I don't like the fact that when you lay stuff out, like the background part of the slide is fixed. Like, you know, it'll give you like the two photographs next to each other and they're nicely cropped and everything. Then the background is gray. It's like, well, I want it to be blue.
00:34:16
Speaker
Well, you have to start over. I believe you can copy those elements to a new slide and you could create your own background.
00:34:24
Speaker
Yeah. There are ways to get around it, but I really like this. You can select in the selection thing. Yeah. So the designer is great for that, you know, quick, down and dirty. You've got, like I was telling Echo, you've got a series of five photos, right? And you need to get them arranged in a grid on a slide. Use designer, bring them back into your own, bring it back into your own deck.
00:34:48
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. That's what I use it for all the time. Let it do the work for the cropping and layout and the arrangement work for you, and then throw that stuff away and just use it on your own. So before we go, you are both setting up LinkedIn Learning classes. Is that right for this year?
Upcoming Learning Opportunities
00:35:10
Speaker
So what are the classes on?
00:35:13
Speaker
Mine is basic techniques for data visualization. So toning down color, how to highlight certain data points. I can't even talk, can I? How to highlight certain data points, different chart types. I think I'm going to talk about some alternatives to pie charts, things like that. That's great. Julie, what about yours? Slide design makeovers.
00:35:38
Speaker
Oh, nice. OK. So taking your common slide types and turning them into something that's a little bit more appealing, visually appealing, and helping the non-designer get a little bit more creative with their style.
00:35:54
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, that's great. Well, I'll link to both your sites so people can check them out and look forward to the learning classes. And then I want to make sure I mentioned the presentation guild that you were both founding members of and Echo, I think you are still teaching the boot camps, right?
00:36:12
Speaker
Yeah. I've been working on certifications for the last couple of years. And, uh, you know, Glenn, I was in Glenna Shaw was instrumental in getting our specialist level out there. And we launched that a couple of years ago. And then I think just in the last couple of weeks, we've launched the expert level. So I've been working on that. We'll teach a bootcamp gears from that in the next couple of weeks.
00:36:33
Speaker
That's great. Well, thanks you both for coming on the show. Thanks for another version of the book. I'll see if I can sell my first edition for like five grand on Amazon now. If anybody has screenshots of that four grand thing, I need them. Thanks. You both really appreciate it. Thanks, John. Always fun. Thanks, John.
00:36:56
Speaker
Thanks everyone for tuning into this week's episode of the show. I hope you enjoyed that. I hope you learned a lot. One last thing before I let you go, check out my new WinO community. It's a new app where I send about two or three text messages a week with a great data visualization or a great technique or tip or strategy. I'm also sending out coupon codes for conferences.
00:37:16
Speaker
that I'm speaking at or that others are speaking at that I have been sent, and so I'm sharing those with you. And you can get a free week to check it out, see if you want to receive those text messages. And then after that, it's only five bucks a month. I send only two or three text messages. It goes right to your phone. You can get some great Data Vis content delivered right into your hand. So I hope you enjoyed this week's episode of the show. Until next time, this has been the Policy Vis Podcast. Thanks so much for listening.
00:37:44
Speaker
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00:38:05
Speaker
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