PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

ScriptAssist: Conversation with Bob Befus

Geetesh Bajaj — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 04:00:38 +0000

Bob Befus is an entrepreneur, presentation technology innovator, and recognized expert in regulatory presentations. For most of his career, he has focused on helping medical and pharmaceutical organizations communicate complex information clearly and persuasively in high-stakes settings. He works with leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies preparing for critical presentations, including FDA Advisory Committee meetings.

Bob supported his first FDA Advisory Committee presentation in July 1996 for a meeting of the Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee. As part of that engagement, he developed the first interactive digital display system designed specifically for an FDA Advisory Committee presentation. This technology helped the sponsor manage hundreds or even thousands of data visuals, enabling presenters to rapidly identify the information needed and display it in real time in response to questions from committee members.

Since then, Bob has continued to develop presentation technologies that improve how organizations create, manage, and deliver important scientific and business communications.

In this conversation, Bob discusses ScriptAssist, a PowerPoint teleprompter that lets presenters hold eye contact on video calls while still reading their script.

Geetesh: ScriptAssist is a new addition to the PowerPoint ecosystem. Before we talk about how it came to be, could you briefly introduce ScriptAssist for our readers? Was there a specific turning point that motivated you to create it, and how easy is it for someone to get started once they decide to try it?

Bob: ScriptAssist is a Windows application that works alongside Microsoft PowerPoint, transforming your existing speaker notes into a professional presentation script. It provides multiple script presentation modes for different speaking situations, including an on-camera mode that keeps your script near the webcam for virtual presentations, an invisible overlay mode that lets you control both your script and PowerPoint from a single screen, traditional teleprompter-style modes, AI-assisted script drafting, and a unique Microsoft Word review workflow for collaborative editing.

The inspiration came from nearly four decades of helping organizations prepare for some of their most important presentations. At SlideSource, we’ve supported everything from executive board meetings and investor presentations to scientific conferences and FDA Advisory Committee meetings. Regardless of the audience or venue, we kept seeing the same challenge.

Presenters weren’t struggling because they didn’t know their material. They were struggling because they had to choose between maintaining eye contact with their audience and remembering exactly what they wanted to say. They were also spending far too much time copying scripts between PowerPoint, Word, and other tools just to prepare for a presentation.

Eventually we asked ourselves a simple question, Why hasn’t anyone solved this properly?

ScriptAssist grew from that question. Our goal was never to build another teleprompter. We believe presenters should be thinking about their audience… not their notes. Everything we’ve built into ScriptAssist is designed around that simple idea.

Because ScriptAssist works directly with the PowerPoint presentations and speaker notes people already have, getting started is surprisingly easy. Simply download the application, sign in, open your presentation, and you’re ready to present, usually within just a few minutes.

Geetesh: ScriptAssist seems to have grown out of SlideSource’s experience supporting high-stakes presentations. How much of the product was shaped by real presenters, and how has user feedback influenced its development?

Bob: Almost every major feature in ScriptAssist has its roots in a real presentation challenge.

For years, we developed custom tools and workflows to support high-stakes meetings where accuracy, timing, and confidence were absolutely critical. As we worked with presenters, communications teams, and reviewers, we began noticing recurring problems that weren’t being solved by existing presentation software.

Presenter Script mode evolved from helping speakers who weren’t trained to use traditional teleprompters. Our Microsoft Word review workflow came from working with teams that wanted to review scripts using Word and Track Changes rather than editing directly in PowerPoint. Presentation Timing was developed because presenters constantly asked, “How long is this presentation really going to take?” VoiceSync grew from the desire to let presenters focus entirely on their audience instead of manually scrolling a script.

In many ways, ScriptAssist represents years of lessons learned rather than a single software project.

That feedback loop continues today. Every time we watch someone prepare, rehearse, or deliver a presentation, we learn something. Our philosophy is that new features should solve real presentation problems—not simply add more buttons to the interface.

A recent example involves our AI capabilities. During an early enterprise evaluation, we were asked if ScriptAssist could use an organization’s own approved AI environment rather than a shared AI service. We thought it was an excellent suggestion because it reflects how AI is evolving inside many organizations. As a result, we’re expanding ScriptAssist to support Bring Your Own Model (BYOM), allowing organizations to connect ScriptAssist to their own approved AI environment while continuing to work within their existing governance and security policies. That’s exactly the kind of customer feedback we want to act on.

Geetesh: Can readers try ScriptAssist before purchasing? And if they decide to continue using it, what does it cost?

Bob: Absolutely. We want people to experience ScriptAssist using their own presentations before making a purchasing decision, so we offer a 7-day free trial with full access to the product.

After the trial, users can choose between two subscription plans:

Standard – $12 per month or $144 annually, including the core presentation, scripting, rehearsal, and delivery features.
Pro – $19 per month or $228 annually, adding AI Script Assistant, VoiceSync hands-free presentation control, and other advanced capabilities.

We’re also actively expanding ScriptAssist’s enterprise capabilities as we work with larger organizations.

Our goal from the beginning has been simple: make ScriptAssist affordable enough for individual presenters while building a platform that can grow with the needs of larger organizations.

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.

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PowerPoint and Presenting News: August 11, 2026

Geetesh Bajaj — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 04:30:04 +0000

This issue is about the signal lost in the noise. David Tang and I look at five metrics every CEO actually uses, cutting through dashboards that show everything and decide nothing. Laszlo Diewald explains how presentaid’s Design Checker catches brand drift before it reaches the boardroom. And Maurizio La Cava introduces the MLC Assets Portal, a single place for presentation-ready visuals that removes the usual detour through multiple stock libraries. The topics are different. The underlying problem is the same: too much friction between a good idea and a clear presentation of it.

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

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Five Metrics Every CEO Wants to Know

Geetesh Bajaj — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 04:00:42 +0000

By Geetesh Bajaj and David Tang

There is a story about an airline pilot who spent twenty minutes studying the in-flight entertainment system while the fuel gauge quietly ticked toward empty. It is not a true story. No pilot would do that. But plenty of executives do the equivalent every Monday morning, absorbed in a dashboard that looks impressive and tells them nothing they can act on.

A dashboard is not a decision. It is raw material for one.

A dashboard and a decision are not the same thing. One shows you the data. The other does something with it.

Think of it like a kitchen full of ingredients. The ingredients do not make dinner. The cook does, and only after deciding what the meal needs to be. A CEO staring at thirty trend lines is akin to someone standing in a well-stocked kitchen with no idea what to cook.

The best executives have quietly figured this out. They do not ask, What can we measure?

They ask, What do I need to know to make the next call?

That shift, from measurement to decision, is where KPIs earn their place. Not every number on a dashboard qualifies. A KPI is the number that actually changes what you do next.

Less Dashboard, More Decision

According to Gartner, research and practitioner experience consistently show that dashboards often become overloaded with KPIs, although decision-makers rely on only a small subset of such indicators.

Effective dashboards prioritize a handful of actionable KPIs rather than displaying every available measure.

Set the dashboard aside. Below are five metrics tied directly to decisions a CEO makes. Each one links to its definition, formula, and benchmarks on KPI Depot.

The graphic above is a PowerPoint slide. All five KPIs shown can be built directly in PowerPoint. Each one translates cleanly into a single slide: one question, one number, one decision. That is exactly how KPI slides should work in a presentation.

If you prefer a ready-made starting point, PPT Depot has a wide range of templates covering these and much more.

Now, let us explore each of these metrics individually in plain English.

1. Are We Growing?

A doctor does not walk into a ward round and begin with the complicated tests. The first thing they check is the pulse. It is the number that tells you, before anything else, whether the situation is stable or not.

Revenue Growth is the pulse of a business. It measures how much revenue has increased over a set period, expressed as a percentage. It does not tell you everything. But it tells you something no other number does: whether the market wants more of what you sell.

A rising number means momentum. A flat one means you are running to stand still. A falling one means the conversation in the boardroom is about to get uncomfortable.

Every chief executive checks this number first. Not because it is the most sophisticated metric available, but because everything else depends on it.

Did you know that Amazon reported negative or near-zero profit for most of its first decade as a public company. Investors stayed because revenue growth was relentless. The pulse was strong even when the other vitals looked worrying. It remains one of the most cited examples of a single KPI carrying an entire investment thesis.

2. Are We Actually Making Money?

There is a type of restaurant that is always full. Tables booked weeks ahead, a queue at the door on weekends, a reputation that spreads without advertising. And yet, somehow, it closes. Not because people stopped coming. Because the cost of feeding them always exceeded what they paid.

Busy is not the same as profitable. Revenue growth is not the same as value creation. The metric that separates the two is Net Profit Margin, the share of revenue left over once every cost has been paid.

It is the number that answers the question growth cannot: are we actually building something, or just moving cash around?

A company can expand quickly and bleed slowly at the same time. Margin is what tells you which one is happening before the bank statement does. A leaking bucket is a good example to explain this concept better. The water being filled in the bucket represents the revenue pouring in, while the huge leakage reflects costs that drain away simultaneously. The visual tension is between inflow and outflow, which maps cleanly to the margin concept: money arrives, money leaves, what remains is the point.

Uber is a great example here. They reported revenues of over 13 billion dollars in 2019 and still posted a net loss of 8.5 billion dollars the same year. Revenue was growing. Margin told a different story. It remains one of the most cited examples of the gap between scale and profitability in modern business history.

3. Can We Afford to Grow?

In 1914, Ernest Shackleton set sail for Antarctica with 27 men, three years of supplies, and a plan to cross the continent on foot. The ship got trapped in ice before they reached land. From that moment, everything changed. The expedition was no longer about crossing Antarctica. It was about how long the supplies would last and what decisions needed to be made before they ran out.

Every startup CEO knows that feeling, even if the ice is metaphorical.

Cash Burn Rate is the pace at which a company spends down its cash reserves each month. Divide those reserves by the burn rate and you get your runway: the number of months remaining before the money runs out. Shackleton did not call it that. But he tracked it every single day.

The runway number does not just measure survival. It shapes every decision above it. How bold can we be this quarter? Can we afford to hire? Do we push for growth or cut for margin? The clock answers all of those questions before a word of strategy is spoken.

Shackleton’s expedition survived 22 months stranded in Antarctic conditions without losing a single man, in part because he tracked resources obsessively and made decisions early rather than late. Most companies that run out of cash do the opposite: they know the number and ignore it until the choices disappear.

4. Is This Growth Worth What It Costs?

Imagine a fishing business that spends forty dollars on bait, fuel, and labor to catch a single fish, then sells that fish at the market for nine dollars. The boat stays busy. The nets go out every morning. The crew works hard. And the business loses money on every single catch.

No sensible fisherman would run that operation for long. But versions of it appear in boardrooms every quarter, dressed up in growth numbers and customer acquisition slides.

The CAC-to-CLV Ratio (Customer Acquisition Cost to Customer Lifetime Value Ratio) is the metric that catches this problem early. CAC is what you spend to win a customer. CLV is the total revenue you expect from that customer before they leave. Put the two together and you get a single ratio that answers one question: is winning this customer actually worth what it costs?

A ratio where lifetime value significantly exceeds acquisition cost means the economics work. A ratio that runs the other way means you are the fishing business, scaling a model that loses more money the harder it works.

The generally accepted benchmark in subscription businesses is a CLV-to-CAC ratio of at least 3:1, meaning a customer should be worth at least three times what it cost to acquire them. The figure is widely cited in venture capital due diligence and is often one of the first ratios a growth-stage investor checks before committing capital.

5. Will Our Customers Stay?

Imagine a barbershop that has been cutting hair on the same street since 1920. It has never run a promotion. It has never advertised. Three generations of the same family have kept the chairs warm, and the appointment book full, not because new customers keep finding it, but because the same customers keep coming back. And then their children. And then their children’s children.

That barbershop has a customer retention rate most venture-backed startups would trade their pitch deck for.

Yes, new customers are exciting. However, you cannot forget that kept customers are profitable. Customer Retention measures the percentage of customers who stay with you across a given period. The arithmetic is simple. The implication is profound. A business with high retention compounds, each year built on the foundation of the last rather than scrambling to replace what was lost. A business with low retention runs with both doors open at once, hauling customers in the front while they slip quietly out the back.

Research by Frederick Reichheld of Bain and Company, published in the Harvard Business Review, found that increasing customer retention by just five percentage points can increase profits by anywhere from 25 to 95 percent. The range is wide because it varies by industry, but the direction never changes. Retention pays more than acquisition, in almost every business, almost every time.

The Five at a Glance

Each of the five metrics above answers a question a chief executive actually asks. The table below distils them into their simplest form: the question each KPI answers, the formula behind it, and what a healthy number looks like in practice.

KPI	Key Question	Formula	What Good Looks Like
Revenue Growth	Are we growing?	(Current period revenue – prior period revenue) / prior period revenue × 100	Roughly 10 to 20% a year, higher for early-stage firms
Net Profit Margin	Are we actually making money?	Net income / revenue × 100	Above 10% is generally strong
Cash Burn Rate	Can we afford to grow?	Monthly cash out – monthly cash in (runway = reserves / burn rate)	12 or more months of runway
CAC-to-CLV Ratio	Is this growth worth what it costs?	Customer acquisition cost : customer lifetime value	Lifetime value at least 3 times acquisition cost
Customer Retention	Will our customers stay?	(Customers at end – new customers) / customers at start × 100	85% or higher for established businesses

These targets are directional. Healthy ranges shift by industry and company stage, which is exactly what the benchmark data behind each KPI is for.

If you are presenting these to a leadership team, each row in this table maps to a single slide. Keep the question as the headline, the formula in the notes, and the current number front and center. PowerPoint does not need to carry the analysis. It needs to carry the answer.

The Point of the Five

None of these numbers exists to fill a slide.

Each one answers a question a CEO carries into every meeting: are we growing, are we making money, can we afford our ambition, is that ambition paying off, and will it last.

Put those five in front of a leadership team in plain language, on a PowerPoint slide that does not overcrowd the point, and you have given them something a dashboard rarely does. Not more data, but a clearer decision.

David Tang is the founder of Flevy, the marketplace for business best practices–the same as those produced by top-tier consulting firms and used by Fortune 100 organizations. Flevy is the largest library of best practice documents available online. Prior to Flevy, David worked as a management consultant, where his clients ranged from startups to Fortune 15. David has a MEng and BS in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Cornell University. After Flevy, David created specialized sites such as PPT Depot and KPI Depot.

Geetesh Bajaj is a globally recognized expert in presentation design and strategy, having earned the Microsoft PowerPoint MVP designation for 25 consecutive years, a distinction awarded to individuals who demonstrate deep technical expertise and make sustained contributions to the broader professional community. As a behind-the-scenes strategist within the presentation ecosystem, Geetesh partners with a diverse set of stakeholders, including PowerPoint add-in innovators, creative agencies, and senior business professionals—to advance the clarity, effectiveness, and strategic impact of visual communication.

Based in Hyderabad, India, Geetesh is also the author of six published books. Beyond his professional focus, he pursues interests in reading, photography, and global cuisine through travel and immersive culinary experiences.

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MLC Assets Portal: Conversation with Maurizio La Cava

Geetesh Bajaj — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 04:00:07 +0000

Maurizio La Cava is Co-Founder and CEO of MLC Presentation Design Consulting, the leading presentation design agency in Italy. He is the author of Lean Presentation Design, Presenting Data, Startup Pitch Presentation, and AI Fluency, and teaches pitch and presentation strategy at Politecnico di Milano. He developed the Lean Presentation Design methodology, combining lean thinking, cognitive science and storytelling to help corporate teams communicate with clarity and impact. Before founding MLC, he worked at Accenture and Ferrero International.

In this conversation, Maurizio discusses his new MLC Assets Portal.

The MLC Assets Portal home page: one entry point for presentation-ready visual assets.

Geetesh: Maurizio, can you share the story behind creating the MLC Presentation Assets Portal? What inspired you to build a unified, free resource for presenters, and what gap did you feel it could meaningfully fill?

Maurizio: I built the MLC Assets Portal because I kept watching the same problem repeat itself in corporate work and in my own training sessions. Presenters spend a disproportionate amount of time jumping between several different stock libraries, each with its own licensing rules, search logic and quality bar, just to find one usable image for a slide. That friction pulls attention away from the part of the work that actually matters, which is the argument the slide is meant to support.

I wanted a single place where reliable free image sources could be searched together, filtered for business use, and downloaded without the usual detour through unrelated content. The gap I felt it could fill was not about volume of images. It was about giving corporate teams back the time and mental energy that visual research quietly drains from every deck.

A single search returns presentation-ready results across multiple free asset sources.

Geetesh: For someone discovering this resource for the first time, how do you recommend they use the image library and related tools? Are there specific workflows, search approaches or PowerPoint integrations that help presenters work faster and maintain visual consistency?

Maurizio: My suggestion for a first visit is to start from the business concept rather than the visual. Search for the idea the slide needs to communicate, such as leadership, growth or negotiation, instead of a literal keyword, and let the portal surface options across photos, illustrations, vectors and templates from that single search.

Once you find a style that fits the deck, stay within it for the rest of the presentation. Consistency across a deck comes far more from discipline in selection than from the size of the library itself.

The part I would point a new visitor to first are the PowerPoint templates, because those are the one category we design ourselves. They are proprietary MLC layouts, fully editable, built around the slide jobs business people actually have to solve: a funnel, a timeline, a SWOT, an organisation chart. You are not adapting a generic stock file, you are starting from a layout that was designed by presentation people for that exact purpose.

Proprietary MLC PowerPoint templates, editable and organized by the slide job they solve.

The illustration library, built around business concepts rather than generic keywords.

The second habit worth building from the very first visit is to set up your own Brand Kit. You save your primary and secondary brand colors once, and from that moment every icon and illustration in the portal is recolored to your identity automatically. You can upload your approved logo versions, so the whole team works from the same files and invite colleagues so that everyone produces slides with the same visual language.

Our own Brand Kit: brand colors applied across the portal; plus, the approved logo versions the whole team works from.

Everything you save then travels with you in the Favorites sidebar, which stays one click away while you browse. Your logos and your saved assets are visible next to whatever you are searching for, so you never leave the page to go and find the file you already have.

Saved logos and assets stay one click away in the favorites sidebar while you keep searching.

Once that is in place, saving the portal in your bookmarks turns it into a single point of access to every asset you need, your own brand material included, always available immediately. That is the moment the resource stops being a stock library and starts behaving like your team’s visual workspace.

Geetesh: A more challenging question. Generative AI can now produce an entire deck, images included, from a single prompt. In that context, why would a presenter still open an asset library at all? How do you position the MLC Assets Portal against a tool that simply generates the visual on demand?

Maurizio: It is a fair question, and I would rather answer it directly than defensively, because a large part of my work is teaching corporate teams how to use AI properly and I wrote a book about it. Generative models have genuinely changed the production side of slide making, and anyone claiming otherwise is not paying attention. What they have not changed is the part of the job that decides whether a deck works, which is the judgment about what a specific slide has to prove in front of a specific audience.

When I look at how corporate teams struggle with generated visuals, the same problems come back.

Consistency is the first one: a prompt gives you one image, and forty prompts across a forty-slide deck give you forty images that share no visual logic, which is precisely the friction the portal exists to remove.
Editability is the second, and in my experience, it is the one people underestimate. A generated funnel is a picture of a funnel, while a template funnel is a structure your team can open, restructure, extend and still keep on brand six months later.
Cost is the third and the most practical of them, because generating one usable graphic often means several minutes, several attempts and a striking quantity of tokens for a result that a curated library returns in seconds, and once you multiply that across a team producing decks every day the arithmetic stops adding up.

So, I position the portal as the layer that makes AI usable inside a corporate environment. You save your brand colors and your approved logo versions once, you start from layouts designed around the slide jobs businesspeople really have, and anything you generate elsewhere lands in a system that already knows what your company is supposed to look like.

The workflow I recommend puts the two things in sequence. You use the portal to find quickly the assets that define the graphic baseline of the deck, meaning the style, the palette and the level of abstraction you want to hold across the slides. Then, when a slide needs something that does not exist yet, you pass those selected assets to the model as a visual reference and ask it to produce the custom variation your case requires. Working this way the model has a direction to follow instead of an empty prompt, so what comes back belongs to the same visual family as everything else on the deck. The portal sets the baseline in seconds, and AI extends it exactly where the detail matters, which is why the two reinforce each other in practice.

The portal supplies the graphic baseline, AI expands it.

Speed of assembly was never the real constraint in corporate communication. The constraint has always been deciding what the deck should say and proving it credibly, and generation does not take that work away from the person who has to stand up and present.

There is also a more useful version of this question, which is where AI belongs inside a resource like this one. My answer is behind the scenes, in search and curation rather than in the artwork itself, and that is exactly where I am investing.

Geetesh: Based on your own experience and the feedback you have received from users, what future enhancements or new capabilities do you envision for this resource? How do you see it evolving to support the changing needs of presentation creators?

Maurizio: The feedback I hear most often points in one direction: presenters do not want more assets; they want faster judgment about which asset is right for their specific slide.

The most interesting development I am working on right now is a self-learning engine that lets the portal evolve according to the aggregate searches of the people who use it. When many users look for a concept and the results are not satisfying, the system detects that gap automatically and triggers an agent whose job is to enrich the asset database exactly where the shortfall was found.

The consequence is a resource that improves the more it is used. Every search that comes up short stops being a dead end and becomes an instruction for what to add next, so the library grows around the real needs of the people building presentations rather than around my assumptions about them.

Alongside that, I see real value in expanding the template and illustration side, since corporate audiences increasingly expect a diagram or a structured visual rather than a decorative photo. The direction I care about most is not adding volume for its own sake, but making sure every addition earns its place by solving a real moment of friction in the presentation building process.

MLC Assets Portal.
MLC Assets Portal

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presentaid Design Checker: Conversation with Laszlo Diewald

Geetesh Bajaj — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 04:00:42 +0000

Laszlo Diewald has been working as a consultant for more than 10 years now. He started his career as an employee right after his study at the Technical University of Munich. Shortly after, he decided to become self-employed as a freelance consultant. In 2017, he founded his own consultancy, with a focus on large scale projects in the financial sector. In parallel, he started working on presentaid, which was finally launched in April 2022.

In this conversation, Laszlo talks about presentaid’s new Design Checker option.

Geetesh: Laszlo, let’s start with the “why.” Your documentation frames Design Checker around brand drift, where decks slowly lose their polish as they get copied, edited, and rushed under deadline pressure. Was there a specific moment or piece of customer feedback that convinced you that Design Checker was worth building as part of presentaid, or had it been on the roadmap for a while?

Laszlo: It had been on my mind for a while, but it wasn’t one dramatic moment. It was a pattern that kept repeating in customer conversations. I come from a PMO and project management background myself, so I’ve lived through the exact scenario Design Checker is built for: a deck gets built, then copied, then edited by three more people, then merged with slides from last quarter’s version, all under the usual deadline pressure before a steering committee or client meeting. Nobody sets out to ship an off-brand slide; it just accumulates, one small edit at a time, until suddenly there’s a stray font, or a color that’s close-but-not-quite.

What convinced me that this was worth building as a dedicated feature, rather than leaving it as something our Quick Styles and the Color Pane will mostly prevent, was realizing those tools only protect what happens going forward. They don’t catch what’s already in a 60-slide deck someone inherited eight revisions ago. Once I framed it that way – an automated pass that catches what slipped through, rather than another way to apply styles, the rest of the feature basically designed itself around that single job.

Geetesh: Design Checker works against either a deck’s own theme or a company-wide standard, lets users fix, jump to, or ignore each finding. Tell us more about how the feature works day to day, and where it’s headed next.

Laszlo: Day to day, it’s meant to feel like having a very meticulous colleague proofread your deck before you have to. You open the Design Checker pane, hit Check Presentation (or just the slides you’ve got selected), and it scans everything against rules: off-theme fonts and colors, inconsistent titles and footers, shapes hanging off the slide, orphaned footnotes, double spaces, that sort of thing. Findings show up grouped either by slide or by rule, with a severity slider so you can filter down to just errors if you’re in a hurry.

For each finding, you get three options:

Fix it with one click (works across every occurrence of that issue at once),
Jump straight to the slide to look at it yourself (we draw a highlight box right around the offending shape), or
Ignore it if it was intentional.

Everything’s undoable independently of PowerPoint’s own undo history, which matters more than people expect once they start using it.

For teams, there’s a company profile an admin can define: approved fonts, sizes, bullet formatting, so the checker enforces an actual organizational standard, not just internal consistency.

Where is it headed? More rule coverage based on what customer feedback surfaces, and tighter integration with the rest of our library and brand-control tooling, since brand drift and stale content are really two sides of the same problem.

Geetesh: Let us talk about practicalities. How would you frame presentaid’s cost to benefit ratio for someone weighing it against their current workflow, and is there a trial version available for readers who want to try it before committing?

Laszlo: I’d frame it less as a tool that costs X and more as what’s an hour of a senior person’s time worth the night before a board deck. A single user license of presentaid is €23/month or €248/year per user, so it’s well under €1 a day, and that’s for the full toolset, not just Design Checker.

If Design Checker alone saves you from manually eyeballing a deck once a month, it’s already paid for itself many times over, and that’s before counting our automated reports, libraries, agenda, or any of the other features. If you want hard facts, we also have a ROI calculator on our website.

And yes, there’s a 30-day free trial with full functionality, no credit card required. I’d genuinely encourage anyone reading this to just install it and run Design Checker against whatever deck is sitting open on their desktop right now. It tends to be a more convincing argument than anything I can say in an interview. The free trial can be requested on our website.

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PowerPoint and Presenting News: July 28, 2026

Geetesh Bajaj — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 04:30:11 +0000

This issue has a quiet theme running through it: intention before action. Gavin McMahon’s Story Business interview argues that good communication starts with the audience, not with slides. Ramgopal’s Presentation Process AI Club is built on the same belief: clarity comes from thinking, not from generating. And the tutorial on adding guides in PowerPoint 365 is about exactly that, placing every element where it belongs, on purpose. Whether you are crafting a story, structuring an argument, or laying out a slide, this issue is about doing it with a plan.

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

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Adding More Guides in PowerPoint 365 for Windows

Geetesh Bajaj — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 03:45:00 +0000

Have you watched an expert tailor at work? They start by marking the pattern on the fabric. They don’t just slap down one chalk mark on the fabric and call it a day. There’s one chalk mark for the hem, another for the waist, and yet another for the sleeve length. Every single mark earns its place on that fabric. PowerPoint hands you the design equivalent of that very first chalk mark: one horizontal guide, one vertical guide, crossing politely at dead center of your slide. That works well for simple layouts, but more complex designs call for a more complete guide structure. Just like the tailor who can add chalk marks as needed, you can add more guides to create a proper visual structure for your slides.

Learn how to add more guides in PowerPoint 365 for Windows.

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AI Club from Presentation Process: Conversation with Ramgopal M. S.

Geetesh Bajaj — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 04:00:00 +0000

Ramgopal M. S. is the founder of Presentation Process and author of Clear Slides. Over the past 20 years, he has helped millions of professionals communicate complex ideas through clear, engaging presentations. His YouTube channel has over 560,000 subscribers, where he shares practical PowerPoint and presentation design techniques.

In this conversation, Ramgopal discusses the Presentation Process AI Club initiative.

Geetesh: Ramgopal, you’ve spent years teaching presenters to think before they design. What was the moment or realization that convinced you this needed an AI Club rather than another course or template bundle? And how do you make sure the AI tools reinforce that thinking-first philosophy instead of undermining it?

Ramgopal: For close to two decades, through our Presentation Process YouTube channel and our courses, we’ve been teaching one simple principle: Don’t open PowerPoint first. Think first.

Before you create a single slide, you need to figure out what you’re really trying to say. What are your key assertions? Do they tell a logical, cohesive story? What evidence supports each point? Once that thinking is clear, designing the slides becomes relatively straightforward.

Then AI presentation tools arrived, and they encouraged people to do almost the exact opposite. The message suddenly became, “Just type a one-line prompt and your presentation is ready.” People started treating AI slide generators like an ATM for presentations. To be fair, the slides often looked polished and professionally designed. It’s easy to see why people assumed that was all a good presentation required.

But when they stood up to deliver those presentations, reality caught up with them. The slides looked finished. The thinking wasn’t. The content was often generic. The message lacked depth. More importantly, presenters felt they weren’t really speaking with their own voice or expertise. Their credibility took a hit. That experience brought them back to something we’ve been saying all along: clear presentations begin with clear thinking.

That’s when we started hearing a different kind of request from our community. People weren’t asking for more templates. They weren’t asking for another course on slide design. They wanted help thinking through their presentations. That was the reason we created the AI Club.

A course has an important role, but it teaches a process once. A template bundle helps after you’ve already decided what to say. Neither one helps you every single time you’re building a presentation from scratch.

We wanted something that could become a thinking partner. Every tool inside the AI Club has a very specific job. One helps you define your presentation objective. Another helps you identify the evidence you need. Others help you digest research, organize your ideas, stress-test your arguments, and refine your message. Only after that work is done do we move anywhere near slide layouts or design.

That sequence is intentional. If one of our AI tools allowed someone to skip straight to “Make my slides,” I would consider that a failure, not a feature. In my view, slide creation is the last step in presentation building, not the most important one. The AI Club exists to support the part of the presentation process where people need the most help: thinking. The AI isn’t there to replace judgment. It’s there to make better judgment easier.

How I Create Memorable Presentations.
How I Create Memorable Presentations

Geetesh: How has the feedback been from early users? Are members using it the way you expected, and has anything surprised you, about how they’re steering the AI?

Ramgopal: The early feedback has been very encouraging, and in many ways, it has confirmed what we hoped would happen. But it also revealed a few things we didn’t expect.

The most heavily used tool inside the AI Club is our Blueprint Studio. That wasn’t a surprise. It takes people from a raw idea to a presentation-ready plan. It helps them build an opening, structure their argument, anticipate objections, and create a complete presentation outline, slide by slide, with speaker notes. For someone starting with a blank page, it removes a huge amount of uncertainty.

What did surprise us was how much people use the Presentation Thinking Studio. Most presenters usually want to jump straight into making slides. This tool doesn’t let them do that. Instead, it asks a series of questions that force them to think: Who am I speaking to? What am I really trying to argue? What evidence supports my message? What objections might I face? By the time they’re done, they know exactly where they stand before a single slide is created. The popularity of that tool taught us something important. People don’t struggle with slides as much as they struggle with knowing what to say before the slides.

Every other AI tool in the Club assumes you already know your message. The Presentation Thinking Studio is different. Its job is to help you discover that message. It helps you find the core idea around which the entire presentation should be built. Judging by how often members use it, that’s the problem many presenters have been trying to solve all along.

Another surprise was who showed up. Historically, our YouTube channel has attracted business presenters and people creating persuasive presentations. Inside the AI Club, however, we’ve seen many teachers, researchers, doctors, engineers, trainers, and other technical professionals become active members. When we thought about it, it made perfect sense. A persuasive presentation already has built-in tension. Someone is deciding whether to buy, approve, invest, or decide. Informational presentations are different. Their challenge is creating clarity and maintaining interest while explaining dense, technical material. That’s arguably the harder communication problem.

Our thinking-first workflow seems to resonate particularly well with these presenters because they’re not looking for prettier slides. They’re trying to explain complex ideas in a way that people can understand. In fact, we’ve since added a dedicated set of AI tools specifically for technical and educational presentations, and those have been seeing strong usage as well.

Finally, we’ve also realized just how much confusion exists in the market today. With so many AI slide generators promising instant presentations, many presenters have been led to believe that creating slides is the hard part. Our members are discovering the opposite.

The hardest part isn’t designing the slides. It’s developing a clear message and a logical structure. That’s exactly where the AI Club is designed to help. Rather than replacing the thinking process, it gives people a framework for doing that thinking better. And judging by the feedback so far, that’s the support many presenters have been looking for.

Geetesh: How can someone try the AI Club? Is there a trial available?

Ramgopal: Yes, we offer a free 7-day trial at our site. The idea behind the trial is very simple. Don’t use it to experiment with random prompts. Use it on a real presentation that truly matters to you. Bring the presentation you’re currently working on. Maybe it’s an important client meeting, a conference talk, a technical presentation, a lecture, or a board presentation. Put it through the same process you normally would, but this time let the AI Club help you think through it.

Use the Blueprint Studio to turn a rough idea into a structured presentation. Run your argument through the Presentation Thinking Studio and see whether your message is as clear as you thought it was. Ask Ramgopal AI the questions you’ve been struggling with. Challenge your assumptions. Refine your outline. Stress-test your reasoning.

That’s the best way to judge whether the Club is useful. Seven days is usually enough for people to know. If you don’t find that it improves the way you think through presentations, simply cancel before the trial ends. You won’t be charged, and there are no questions asked.

If you do find it valuable, your membership continues at $39 per month, and you’re free to cancel at any time after that as well. We’d be happy to extend $10 off our monthly subscription—bringing the price down to $29/month (regularly $39/month) for Indezine readers. They can simply enter the coupon code INDZ at checkout to claim the offer.

The philosophy behind the trial is the same philosophy behind the AI Club itself. You can’t really evaluate a thinking tool by trying a few prompts. The only meaningful test is to use it on a presentation you genuinely care about.

If it helps you think more clearly, organize your ideas better, and build a stronger presentation, you’ll know it. If it doesn’t, you’ll know that too. We felt that was the fairest way to let people decide.

The post AI Club from Presentation Process: Conversation with Ramgopal M. S. appeared first on PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff.

Story Business: Conversation with Gavin McMahon

Geetesh Bajaj — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 04:00:29 +0000

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.

Geetesh: Gavin, Story Business grew out of your work in strategy, leadership, and consulting. What kept going wrong in the way good ideas were communicated, and why did that make you want to write the book?

Gavin: I kept seeing the same problem through different doors. Clients would come to us with a strategy people weren’t executing, a leadership message that wasn’t landing, or a capability they needed to build. On the surface, these looked like different problems. Underneath, they are all translation problems.

Leaders had good ideas, solid data, and plenty of PowerPoint. Yet people couldn’t see what the idea meant for them or what they were supposed to do next. The strategy stayed in the boardroom, and people went back to doing yesterday’s work. That is the gap I wanted to address.

Story Business treats storytelling as a practical business skill. It helps people package ideas so others can understand them, believe them, remember them, and act on them. The central idea is simple: It’s not the best idea that wins; it’s the best-packaged idea.

When you ask, “Why now?” I would say storytelling is humanity’s oldest technology. It matters now more than ever as frontier technologies produce more information, more channels, and more content than we know what to do with.

Meaning is still scarce. Leaders need a better way to take complexity and make it simple. To share context. To frame the way people see the world and move them to action.

Geetesh: Story Business has won Gold in the Business & Career category at the 2026 IBPA Book Awards and earned praise from Ken Blanchard and other respected leaders. What does that recognition mean to you, and what do you hope it signals to readers?

Gavin: Thank you. The book has also been shortlisted for Business Book of the Year and nominated for other awards. The good news is that someone has read it. When you’re in the middle of writing a book, the thought that no one might read it crosses your mind…

The awards and accolades mean a great deal. A book begins as a private act. It is years of work, experience, and ideas rattling around in your head. Recognition like this tells me those ideas have made their journey out into the world and connected with people.

Ken Blanchard’s praise is especially meaningful. And a huge surprise. He has spent a career taking management ideas and making them simple, memorable, and useful. That is what I wanted Story Business to do. For readers, I hope the recognition acts as a signal. Storytelling belongs to the center of how we lead, sell, build products, shape culture, and create value. It shapes how we think. It’s part of the human condition.

Hopefully, an award helps someone pick up the book. If you’re reading this, I hope you do. The real success comes when that reader takes one idea from the book to make a strategy clearer, a presentation stronger, or a decision easier. That is the win.

Geetesh: Indezine readers know PowerPoint inside out. What is the one change you hope they make in their next presentation after reading Story Business?

Gavin: I would say, don’t open PowerPoint first.

Start with the audience. Write down three things:

What do they feel now?
What do they need to know?
What do you want them to do?

That small pause changes the whole deck. It’s the start of your storytelling journey. It’s the beginning of making your audience the hero of the story.

Most presentations begin in the presenter’s world: the title, the company, the agenda, and everything we want to say.

A strong presentation begins in the audience’s world: the decision they face, the problem in their way, and the better future they can see. Make them the hero.

Then build a clear path: a Hook that earns attention, enough Meat to make the case, and a Payoff that makes the next move obvious.

In practice, replace “Q3 transformation update” with something like “Three decisions that will get the transformation back on track.” Same material. Better headline. Better story. Clearer action. You can tell great stories in PowerPoint, but first you have to tell them in your mind.

The post Story Business: Conversation with Gavin McMahon appeared first on PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff.

PowerPoint and Presenting News: July 21, 2026

Geetesh Bajaj — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 04:30:25 +0000

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.

The post PowerPoint and Presenting News: July 21, 2026 appeared first on PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff.