PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Hierarchical Guide Options in PowerPoint 365 for Windows

Geetesh Bajaj — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 03:45:07 +0000

Marcus thought he’d cracked the code. First, he learned to enable guides. Then, he discovered the right-click menu, and now is adding, coloring, and deleting guides like a pro. Then a colleague mentioned something called guide hierarchy, and Marcus froze. Hierarchy? He thought guides were just… lines. Marcus was happy to learn more. Turns out, guides in PowerPoint have layers, a bit like a family tree. There are guides that belong to the whole family (the Slide Master), guides that belong to individual branches (Slide Layouts), and guides that belong to just one person (your actual slides).

Learn about hierarchical guide options in PowerPoint 365 for Windows.

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PowerPoint and Presenting News: September 8, 2026

Geetesh Bajaj — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 04:30:54 +0000

Credibility is the thread running through this issue. INSYNCR, as Kurt Dupont explains, exists because a generated figure looks right but a bound figure is right, and the distinction is what boardrooms and client reports depend on. Laszlo Diewald’s presentaid Charts interview makes a similar point: annotations that move with the data, charts that open correctly for anyone, and numbers that don’t drift between tools. Then there is Presentation Summit 2026, September 13 to 16, where our conversations with Camille Holden, Chantal Bosse, Ilene Bergelson, and Sally Zimney remind us that credibility is just as fragile in the room as it is in the spreadsheet behind the slide.

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

The post PowerPoint and Presenting News: September 8, 2026 appeared first on PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff.

Presentation Summit 2026: Conversation with Troy Chollar

Geetesh Bajaj — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 04:15:20 +0000

Troy Chollar is co-founder and a Sr. Designer of TLC Creative Services and awarded by Microsoft as an MVP for PowerPoint for 24 consecutive years. For more than two decades, Troy has helped organizations create presentations ranging from executive briefings and sales decks to large-scale live event experiences. A regular presenter at The Presentation Summit (he was an attendee at the very first conference!), host of The Presentation Podcast, and the voice of ThePowerPointBlog, Troy is passionate about sharing practical PowerPoint techniques, animation strategies, and workflow improvements that presentation professionals can immediately apply to their own projects.

In this conversation, Troy talks about the upcoming Presentation Summit 2026, being held virtually from September 13 to 16, 2026.

Indezine.com is the official media partner for the Presentation Summit.

Geetesh: Troy, you’re delivering two sessions this year, Design Faster! and PowerPoint Animation for Grown-Ups. Design Faster! combines a Stream Deck, add-ins, and QAT tricks into one workflow. What led you to bring these three specific tools together rather than treating them separately?

Troy: I will focus on the Design Faster! session because that’s where I’ll be diving into my real-world use of a Stream Deck, PowerPoint add-ins, and customized Quick Access Toolbar. While these are all tools, the common thread isn’t the tools themselves, it’s the workflows they enable. This session is about how to setup a workflow that makes presentation design faster – using some amazing tools!

Over the years at TLC Creative Services, I’ve realized that most presentation designers lose far more time to small interruptions than to big challenges. We spend our days repeating hundreds of little actions: formatting objects, aligning content, switching between commands, and navigating menus. Each action is generally relatively minor, but without an efficient workflow those moments add up to an amazing amount of wasted time every day.

The Stream Deck, PowerPoint add-ins, and the Quick Access Toolbar each solve different parts of that workflow problem. Individually, they’re useful tools. Combined, we can create a design workflow that is noticeably faster, more consistent, and enables us to create design and layouts.

My goal is not to convince attendees they need specific tools. It’s to show how thinking intentionally about your design workflow can eliminate friction, streamline the repetitive work, and let you spend more time designing with less time clicking.

Geetesh: PowerPoint Animation for Grown-Ups looks at advanced animation to improve clarity, not just add polish. Where do you draw the line between animation that helps communication and animation that gets in its way?

Troy: The line for me is whether the motion is helping the audience know where to look and what to understand.

For me, presentation animation is any onscreen motion the audience sees. That includes effects from the animation pane, slide transitions, video, and even unintended movement when elements jump between slides (I hate seeing that!). The rule is, motion automatically attracts attention – so every movement needs a reason.

Everyone hears me talk about animation and showcase cool things. But animation in a presentation is not always good. It starts getting in the way when it becomes inconsistent or creates what I call “animation noise.” If the audience is focused on anticipating the next effect instead of listening to the presenter, the animation is working against the message.

Conversely, good animation establishes a consistent rhythm and controls the flow of information. It can reveal a process, bring focus to a specific item as the presenter is discussing it, and guide the audience through dense content.

My basic test is: Should this animate at all? If the motion supports the content and the presenter, it belongs. If the audience notices the effect more than the message, it probably does not.

Of course, this is still a Presentation Summit session, so we’ll talk about animation philosophy, but we’ll spend even more time showcasing some amazing PowerPoint techniques and examples that everyone can apply to their own presentations!

Geetesh: Your studio has spent years pushing PowerPoint into live event territory, large screens, synchronized multi-screen setups, that kind of scale. Has any of that “big stage” thinking made its way into how you approach a single laptop presentation?

Troy Absolutely. Working on large-scale events forces you to become very intentional about the audience experience. When you’re creating content for an amazing 200-foot-wide LED wall in a general session, every element has to earn its place. The slide design needs to work in the environment and have purpose and precision. Those aren’t optional because audiences immediately notice awkward design or content that is not literally pixel perfect.

That mindset transfers directly to a laptop presentation, an advisor board meeting, or breakout room with a 50-, 65-, or 80-inch display.

The same principles need to apply: establish a clear visual hierarchy, guide attention deliberately, remove distractions with objects aligned and distributed perfect on each slide and across slides. The slides should support the speaker, not compete with them.

Large-event work is also thinking in terms of moments rather than slides. Audiences don’t remember slide 37. They remember the moment they understood a concept, saw something unexpected, or connected with an idea. That’s true at a giant event with amazing staging and really-really big screens, and it’s just as true single-screen meeting or a laptop presentation.

The technology and scale may change, but good presentation design is still about helping presenters communicate clearly and helping the audience remember what matters.

What is the Presentation Summit?

For over two decades, Rick Altman has been hosting the Presentation Summit, a highly popular event that is geared towards users of PowerPoint and other presentation platforms.

Indezine.com is the official media partner for the Presentation Summit.

Virtual: September 13 to 16, 2026

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.

The post Presentation Summit 2026: Conversation with Troy Chollar appeared first on PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff.

Presentation Summit 2026: Conversation with Lori Chollar

Geetesh Bajaj — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 04:15:20 +0000

Lori Chollar is co-founder and CEO of TLC Creative Services, Inc., a design studio that thrives in the presentation world, and the live and virtual event industry. Her diverse design background spans traditional graphic and print design, apparel and product design, and a whole lot of presentation, template, and multimedia design. Building from a formal degree in graphic design to a thriving freelance business, her company with husband Troy has grown into a successful corporate design studio. Lori is passionate about good design and good business.

In this conversation, Lori talks about the upcoming Presentation Summit 2026, being held virtually from September 13 to 16, 2026.

Indezine.com is the official media partner for the Presentation Summit.

Geetesh: Lori, your session this year is Put Your Deck on a Diet, about shrinking bloated files into fast, manageable presentations. Is file bloat mostly a design discipline problem, or does PowerPoint itself need to do more to prevent it?

Lori: I think the answer is a little bit of both, but if I had to choose one, I’d say it’s usually a workflow and design discipline problem.

PowerPoint is actually very forgiving, sometimes a little too forgiving. It will happily accept a 25MB image that’s only being displayed as a small thumbnail on a slide. It’ll let you import videos, create duplicate slide masters, embed fonts, keep dozens of hidden slides, and generally continue adding content without warning you that performance may start to suffer.

That being said, PowerPoint gives us a lot of tools to help manage file size and performance. And while we use those tools, to effectively optimize a file we also use a variety of add-ins and other software applications.

At TLC Creative, we work with presentations that are often used in high-stakes environments such as sales meetings, product launches, investor events, and large general sessions. In those situations, file size isn’t really a storage problem, it’s a performance problem. A sluggish deck can affect editing, collaboration, rehearsal, and even presenter confidence.

One of the main points of my session is that the easiest presentation to optimize is the one that’s built correctly from the beginning. A few good habits can prevent many of the issues people encounter later. The challenge is that many people don’t think about optimization until a file becomes painful to use. By then, they’re reacting to a problem instead of preventing one.

Geetesh: You’ve been a regular voice at the Presentation Summit for several years now. With so many more tools now competing for attention in the presentation space, has the audience’s relationship with PowerPoint itself changed, or does it still hold its ground?

Lori: There are certainly more tools available today than there were when I first started attending and speaking at the Summit. New design platforms, AI-powered tools, collaborative workspaces, video-based communication tools, and countless other presentation-related technologies have all entered the conversation.

What’s interesting, though, is that PowerPoint continues to hold an incredibly important place in the business world.

One reason for this is flexibility. PowerPoint isn’t just a presentation tool. It’s become a communication platform. Organizations use it for presentations, sales materials, internal communications, event graphics, training materials, executive briefings, and much more. It’s difficult to find another tool that can comfortably serve all of those purposes while remaining intuitive and easy to learn.

I think what’s changed most is not PowerPoint’s relevance, but our expectations. Audiences expect more. Presenters expect more. And of course, our presentation clients certainly expect more. The quality of visual communication continues to rise, and tools like AI are helping people work faster and explore ideas more quickly.

At the same time, some things haven’t changed. Strong content and storytelling, thoughtful design, and clear communication are still what make presentations effective. The software is important, but it’s not what ultimately makes a presentation memorable.

PowerPoint remains one of the most versatile canvases available, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

Geetesh: If a presenter wants the biggest improvement in their work for the least amount of effort, what’s the one thing you’d tell them to focus on?

Lori: I would tell them to focus on clarity.

Not animations. Not fancy transitions. Not the latest design trend.

Clarity.

Whenever we’re designing presentations, we’re constantly asking ourselves a simple question: “What is the audience supposed to understand from this slide?”

If that answer isn’t immediately clear, the slide usually needs more work.

Some of the biggest improvements we make is simply simplifying content, reducing visual clutter, creating better hierarchy, and giving important information room to breathe. These aren’t necessarily complicated design skills. They’re often small decisions that make a very big difference.

Interestingly, clarity also connects back to the subject of my session. Just as cluttered slides can make information harder to understand, cluttered PowerPoint files can make presentations harder to build, edit, and deliver. In both cases, removing what’s unnecessary allows the important things to simply work better.

Good presentations aren’t about adding more. Very often, they’re about knowing what to take away.

What is the Presentation Summit?

For over two decades, Rick Altman has been hosting the Presentation Summit, a highly popular event that is geared towards users of PowerPoint and other presentation platforms.

Indezine.com is the official media partner for the Presentation Summit.

Virtual: September 13 to 16, 2026

The post Presentation Summit 2026: Conversation with Lori Chollar appeared first on PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff.

Presentation Summit 2026: Conversation with John Polk

Geetesh Bajaj — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 04:15:54 +0000

John Polk is the coauthor of Presentation Pitfalls: 10 Traps Business Professionals Fall Into and How to Avoid Them. He is President of John Polk & Associates and a former Data Visualization Professor at the University of Richmond’s Robins School of Business. John designed the “Creating Effective Presentations” workshop for Capital One, which over 10,000 associates have attended. John now teaches workshops and coaches leaders to design and deliver presentations that engage, influence, and drive action.

In this conversation, John talks about the upcoming Presentation Summit 2026, being held virtually from September 13 to 16, 2026.

Indezine.com is the official media partner for the Presentation Summit.

Geetesh: John, your session this year is Power Prompts, about elevating AI from chatbot to collaborator. What’s the difference between a prompt that treats AI like a chatbot and one that treats it like a real collaborator? Also, what takeaways can the audience get from your session at the Presentation Summit?

John: A key strategy for making your AI tool collaborative is giving it the right context. In our workshops, we share worksheets with questions to help presentation designers assess their audience, purpose, and setting so they can make design decisions. Feed your AI tool your completed worksheets to give it context. For example:

I’m presenting to the results-focused CEO. My goals are to share the problem to get funding for my recommendation and ensure the C-Suite trusts that we have the right team to pull this off. The meeting is in person, but the CIO will be on Zoom. My design needs to be simple, but professional. I want to use analogies and stories to illustrate complex concepts.

By the way, your human collaborators benefit from this context too.

The key takeaways from my Presentation Summit session fall into three categories:

Understand AI’s limitations and how prompt engineering can help. For example, AI agrees with you 50% more than humans agree with you (Stanford Report). That’s great for your ego, but less great for your decision-making. To address that, include prompts that encourage AI to stress-test your ideas.
Leverage AI’s roles and provide context. I describe six roles AI can play (e.g., thinking partner or creator). When prompting AI, you’ll get better results if you tell it what role you want it to play.
Apply the POWER-prompt framework. POWER is an acronym for Prepare, Orient, Write, Explore, and Refine. My favorite Prepare Prompt is, “What do you know about me?” AI remembers information you provide to make answers more relevant. That includes information about you. That means it can remember things that are unhelpful or wrong. On the flip side, if you ask it to store useful information about you, it will give more relevant answers. For example, I encouraged a client to share that she recently received her PhD. From then on, AI included complete citations whenever she asked it to do research. The rest of us non-PhDs just get a link to click if we want to verify a source.

Geetesh: Between conducting workshops, coaching speakers, and writing books, where does AI actually save you the most time in your own work today?

John: I’m still amazed at how much time AI can save. But for every time-saving story, I typically have a time-wasting story. And sometimes that’s from the same exercise. Image and video creation can be a huge time savings, especially when you want an image that stock photographers would never think of.

For the cover slide of my POWER Prompts presentation, I wanted to cycle a short video of a Tesla coil, like in the old Frankenstein movies. I wasted an hour with Microsoft Copilot’s Create. I even asked Copilot how to prompt Copilot to get what I wanted. After several failed attempts, Copilot admitted it couldn’t do what I wanted. But then it recommended a free tool that could do the job. It was impressive that AI referred me to a competitor. And hats off to Pika, which nailed it on the first try with this simple prompt: “Create a 10-second video of a Tesla coil with electricity sparking off it.”

Tesla coil.
Tesla coil

A powerful way AI saves time is by cutting through my writer’s block. In the early days of AI, I wrote an article, and the publisher asked for a 300-word abstract. It was hard enough for me to cut my draft article down to 3,000 words, and now they wanted me to summarize it in 300. Impossible! But AI doesn’t care. It quickly gave me a 350-word summary (AI wasn’t good at counting words back then). The summary was subpar, so I changed nearly every word. But it was much faster to edit AI’s subpar summary than to write one myself.

For the record, I wrote the first draft of our book, including the illustrations, without AI.

Geetesh: In Presentation Pitfalls, you and your coauthor Justin Hunsaker wrote about traps like the Frankenstein Trap and the Black Hole Trap. Without giving away too much, which of these traps do you see presenters fall into most often, and what’s the simplest way out of it?

John: That’s like asking me to choose my favorite child! We constantly see presenters fall into all 10 traps. The Expert Trap is certainly one of the top three. Presenters fall into the Expert Trap when they fail to translate their knowledge in a way the audience can understand. When you are an expert on a topic, you forget what it was like to not understand that topic. Experts are passionate about their area of expertise, so they want to share everything they know. Experts also develop jargon, acronyms, and other shortcuts that make it easier to communicate with other experts but harder to communicate with non-experts.

We share three ways out of the Expert trap: analogies, visuals, and frameworks. Analogies are the simplest way out. Analogies are effective because they build on your audience’s existing knowledge. Let’s say you’re a tech startup building a platform that lets homeowners rent their bathrooms. By comparing your idea to Uber, your audience understands that the platform connects bathroom owners and people who need a bathroom. And, just like Uber (usually) provides a better experience than a taxi, your service provides a better experience than a gas station bathroom. AI is a great tool for brainstorming analogy ideas.

What is the Presentation Summit?

For over two decades, Rick Altman has been hosting the Presentation Summit, a highly popular event that is geared towards users of PowerPoint and other presentation platforms.

Indezine.com is the official media partner for the Presentation Summit.

Virtual: September 13 to 16, 2026

The post Presentation Summit 2026: Conversation with John Polk appeared first on PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff.

Presentation Summit 2026: Conversation with Sally Zimney

Geetesh Bajaj — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 04:15:25 +0000

Sally Zimney is an award-winning keynote speaker, communication coach, and author of the #1 bestseller Speaking Story. Ranked in the top 3% of women business speakers, she’s spent 20+ years helping big-hearted leaders and entrepreneurs trade polish for presence — and self-doubt for bold, authentic action. She hosts the top-2% podcast This Moved Me, and her whole obsession is a single question: how do we truly move people? Her answer, especially in an AI world — show up real, imperfections and all.

In this conversation, Sally talks about the upcoming Presentation Summit 2026, being held virtually from September 13 to 16, 2026.

Indezine.com is the official media partner for the Presentation Summit.

Geetesh: Sally, your keynote The Noble Pursuit of Imperfection is about being imperfect in an AI world. What made you want to open this year’s Presentation Summit with that message, rather than a more traditional presentation-skills topic?

Sally: Ha — I love that you caught the irony. A presentation coach walking into a room full of presentation pros to argue for less polish? (Don’t @ me.)

But here’s the thing: this is the one room on earth that has already mastered polish. You could out-design, out-animate, and out-rehearse just about anyone. So, handing you “ten tips for better presenting” is kind of like bringing sand to the beach.

The real frontier isn’t more polish — it’s more humanness (which means more imperfect). Because in a world where AI can spin up a flawless deck in ninety seconds, polish has quietly become the floor, not the ceiling. It’s the price of entry now, not the thing that moves anyone.

What moves people is the crack in the polish. The pause. The real. The human. That’s the one thing that can’t be automated, outsourced, or downloaded — and it happens to be the most persuasive tool any of us has -and the bravest thing we can cultivate, practice, and share.

So, I wanted to open the Summit not by adding one more skill to your stack, but by pointing at the thing you already are that no machine will ever replicate: gloriously, powerfully imperfect. That felt like the braver way to start.

Geetesh: As AI tools get better at generating polished slides and scripts, does that make organic imperfection harder to hold onto — or more important than ever?

Sally: Yes. Both. And that’s exactly the paradox I want us to sit in.

It’s harder, because the tools make flawless so easy and so tempting. When you can smooth every edge, script every word, and auto-generate every slide, the pull to do it is enormous. We’ve always confused professional with perfect — and now perfect is one click away.

But that’s precisely why it matters more. When everyone can look flawless, flawless stops meaning anything. It becomes wallpaper. Sameness. And in a sea of sameness, the real becomes the rare — and the rare is what we remember.

Think about Robert Kelly — “BBC Dad” — live on the BBC when his toddler came marching in, followed by the baby in the walker, followed by his mortified wife skidding across the floor to retrieve them. He was sure he’d blown it in front of the whole world. Instead, tens of millions of us fell in love with him — not despite the chaos, but because of it. That was the human moment no producer could have scripted.

AI can generate perfect. It cannot generate that. So no, I don’t think we’re losing imperfection to the machines. I think it’s about to become the most valuable thing in the room.

Geetesh: Your book Speaking Story is about the mechanics of story as a persuasive tool. For a room full of presentation and PowerPoint professionals, how can story enrich the slides they already build?

Sally: Here’s the loving truth I’d offer this room: your slides are not your story. And a lot of the time, they’re quietly competing with it.

Presentation pros build genuinely beautiful decks — but a beautiful deck is often just beautifully-formatted information. And information doesn’t move anyone to do anything. Facts tell; stories sell. Story is what makes a room lean in, feel the stakes, and actually remember you on the drive home.

The good news is you don’t have to choose. Story isn’t a competitor to great slides — it’s the spine that makes them matter. The best decks I’ve ever seen aren’t a list of points with visuals attached; they’re a narrative with a human experience at the center, and every slide is there to serve a single moment in that story.

So, the “enrichment” is almost a reordering. Before you open PowerPoint, find the one true story — the specific moment, the real

What is the Presentation Summit?

For over two decades, Rick Altman has been hosting the Presentation Summit, a highly popular event that is geared towards users of PowerPoint and other presentation platforms.

Indezine.com is the official media partner for the Presentation Summit.

Virtual: September 13 to 16, 2026

The post Presentation Summit 2026: Conversation with Sally Zimney appeared first on PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff.

presentaid Charts: Conversation with Laszlo Diewald

Geetesh Bajaj — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 04:00:05 +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 the new presentaid Charts feature.

Geetesh: Laszlo, let’s start with the “why.” presentaid already had a Gantt chart for project timelines. What made now the right time to expand into a full charting feature with waterfalls, Mekkos, and the rest.

Laszlo: A Gantt chart answers when. Almost everything else in a strategy deck answers how much – and why.

We had spent years covering the rest of the deck: agenda slides, alignment and formatting, the design checker, live data grids, automated reporting. Someone could build nearly an entire pack without leaving presentaid. Then they would hit one slide that needed a bridge from last year’s EBITDA to this year’s, and they would leave. Charts weren’t a gap in our feature list. They were the last reason to have a second tool installed.

presentaid Charts.
presentaid Charts

The other half of the answer is about our industries specifically. In consulting and financial services, the chart is not an illustration of the argument – it is the argument. A waterfall showing exactly where the margin went. A Mekko showing that most of the revenue sits in the segment growing slowest. If that is the work you do, you are not shopping for “charting”. You want the four or five chart types your industry actually argues with, done properly, with the annotations that make the point visible. That is a far narrower problem than building a general chart engine, and it is why we could do it well rather than broadly.

There is also a compounding effect we underestimated. The same numbers turn up in a monthly status report, a board pack and a pitch deck. If the charts live in a different tool from the rest of your deck automation, you rebuild them three times – and you get to explain three slightly different versions of the same figure.

Geetesh: The presentaid documentation is emphatic that these stay native PowerPoint charts, with a real embedded data sheet, rather than flattened images or shape groups. Walk us through how that works day to day, from inserting a waterfall or Mekko chart, decorating it with growth arrows or CAGR lines, to linking it live to an Excel file, and what happens when someone without presentaid opens that same deck.

Laszlo: Start with the insert. You pick Waterfall from the gallery and you get a PowerPoint chart. Not a picture of one, not a group of shapes pretending to be one – the real thing, with its own embedded data sheet behind it. Click Edit Data and you are in the spreadsheet you already know how to use.

Then you decorate. Select the chart and a small toolbar appears above it.

Add a growth arrow between two columns, a CAGR line across the series, total labels above the stacks. The part that matters is what those annotations are attached to: the chart, not the slide. An arrow knows it runs from the top of the 2026 column to the top of the 2028 column. Change a number and it moves with it. Resize the chart and the whole layer re-lays itself out – arrows shift so they don’t cross each other, labels flip between black and white so they stay readable against whatever color they land on.

Linking to Excel works the same way. You point at a workbook and a range, and we write those numbers into the chart’s own data sheet. The link is a convenience, never a dependency – the deck is complete and correct without the source file anywhere near it. When that file changes, an amber “Data changed” chip appears on the toolbar and waits. It will not refresh behind your back. Ten minutes before a board meeting is not when you want figures moving on their own.

Then someone without presentaid opens the deck – and sees a chart. That is the whole design goal.

They can click it, edit the data, recolor it, drop it into a client pack, print it. The arrows and labels are ordinary PowerPoint shapes. Nothing is greyed out, nothing says, “install this add-in to view”, and nothing collapses into a flat image the first time a number changes. That matters commercially: our users send decks to clients, regulators and boards, and they cannot ask any of them to buy software first.

If a colleague edits the numbers without presentaid, the chart updates immediately, but the arrows and labels stay as they were until someone with presentaid opens the file and they recompute. We took that trade deliberately. The alternative is a proprietary object that only renders for license holders, and we are not willing to hold a customer’s deck hostage to our own software.

Geetesh: PowerPoint already ships with its own native chart engine, and plenty of add-ins layer chart types on top of it. What does presentaid’s charting feature add that Microsoft’s own implementation doesn’t, and how do you see it standing apart from other chart add-ins on the market?

Laszlo: PowerPoint gives you the chart types that Excel gives and stops there. No Mekko. No bridge worth the name. And there is no way to put a growth arrow on a column and have it stay attached. You can draw an arrow, of course, but it is a floating shape, and it is wrong the moment anything moves.

That last point is the entire game. Almost everyone in our industries already annotates their charts. They just do it by hand, with text boxes and lines, and then they do it again next month when the actuals land.

It is very important for us to send this message: We didn’t add chart types. We added a layer that understands the chart underneath it.

Arrows anchored to data points rather than coordinates. Labels that move aside instead of overlapping. Axis breaks that keep the gridlines aligned when one bar dwarfs the rest. Charts on the same slide sharing a scale, so the comparison is honest. And a company chart style that applies the moment a chart is inserted – a hundred consultants produce decks that look like they came from the same firm, without any of them thinking about it.

On other chart add-ins, I would rather say what we optimize for than characterize anyone else. Two things. First, native output, for every reason we just went through. Second – and this is the real difference – presentaid is not a chart add-in that learned to do decks. It is a deck add-in that now does charts.

The person building a pitch deck needs agenda slides, alignment, a design check before it leaves the building, live data grids, a Gantt, automated reporting – and charts. Most power users in banking and consulting are running two or three tools to cover that. They pay for the overlap, and they live with the seams between them. We can now be the one.

That is the honest version of the pitch. Not “we have more chart types than the next tool”. It is that this was the last gap we had, and closing it means you do not need anything else.

None of which is worth arguing about on paper. This is a tool you judge by building one chart with it – so take the deck you dread rebuilding every month and put it through ours. Try it on your own numbers. presentaid is a PowerPoint add-in for people who live in decks – charts, agendas, alignment, design checking and automated reporting in one place.

Start a free trial: all features, 30 days, no credit card required.

The post presentaid Charts: Conversation with Laszlo Diewald appeared first on PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff.

Presentation Summit 2026: Conversation with Ilene Bergelson

Geetesh Bajaj — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 04:15:11 +0000

Ilene Bergelson is a NYC-based presentation coach who specializes in working with experts to communicate their knowledge, so it resonates, builds credibility, and sparks connection. A published author and guest lecturer at NYU and other colleges, she draws on her background in Broadway performance, biomechanics, and applied improvisation to bring both precision and play to her work. Through EmpowerSpeak, Ilene has partnered with boutique firms and Fortune-50 companies alike, guiding speakers to find their voice, embrace adventure, and have fun while compelling their audience.

In this conversation, Rick talks about the upcoming Presentation Summit 2026, being held virtually from September 13 to 16, 2026.

Indezine.com is the official media partner for the Presentation Summit.

Geetesh: Ilene, your two sessions this year are both about content and delivery — just not in the way attendees might expect. Designing Relief looks at the physical toll that creating content takes on your body. Impromptu Confidence treats agility in unscripted moments as part of delivery itself. What led you to explore both of these angles this year? Both sessions also lean on physical, in-the-room energy — improv games, tension-release techniques. How do you tailor them for virtual participation?

Ilene: Showing up as our best sometimes means giving ourselves some relief. I offered these sessions because it seems like the right time to have some fun taking the edge off the things that can hold us back.

Designing Relief is for the shoulders creeping up around your ears by your fourth call of the day, the tension headache that shows up right on schedule and swallows your creativity, the neck (or legs!) you forgot you had. We don’t have to suffer. I’ll share simple, feel-so-good techniques I learned from some of the best physical therapists and body workers in the country I met while touring as a performing artist.

Impromptu Confidence is for those on-the-fly moments that make us clam up in a different way: the moment you’re asked to speak without notice, or the beat after a talk when a question has nothing to do with your slides and your mind goes blank. Either kind of stress moves through our whole system — stiff physically, and stiff in our thinking too.

Fortunately, since tension release and mental agility are needed in every room, a virtual room is just as good a place to build them as any stage. Designing Relief uses desk-friendly moves — standing or sitting — to get unstuck, re-juice stiff joints, and intercept a tension headache before it takes hold. Bring a tennis ball for extra bliss! Impromptu Confidence relies on a few games — fun, surprising, and sneakily effective at building comfort with being put on the spot.

Geetesh: If you could give presenters just one piece of advice to carry with them beyond this year’s Summit, what would it be?

Ilene: Connect! Take full advantage of the warmth of the PresSum community: come to Office Hours and the social events — some of the best unplanned conference moments happen there. You are likely to meet people that you’ll want to stay in touch with, so message people and connect outside the conference. Don’t let shyness, imposter syndrome, or inertia stop you from reaching out!

Geetesh: You’ve coached speakers across a range of industries, from health and finance to pharma and entertainment. Does your coaching approach shift by industry, or does the core work stay the same?

Ilene: The core work never changes — it’s getting the speaker’s nervous system out of the way of their expertise and cultivating their power to connect meaningfully with their specific audience. The ratio between each of those components varies by speaker and situation. A pharma exec fielding an FDA panel and a startup founder walking into a Series B pitch share the same physiological signature under pressure: shallow breath, racing thoughts, an urge to over-explain. But they’re also solving the same craft problem — what does this audience need to hear, and how do we build toward it with intention instead of just information?

What affects my approach much more than the industry is the individual themselves, their audience, the content and the situation. The stakes, the jargon, the regulatory guardrails, as well as what’s culturally appropriate and effective in the room all factor into the situation piece. The skills stay constant everywhere: treat your audience and their takeaway as your North Star, act with intention, and stay true to yourself.

What is the Presentation Summit?

For over two decades, Rick Altman has been hosting the Presentation Summit, a highly popular event that is geared towards users of PowerPoint and other presentation platforms.

Indezine.com is the official media partner for the Presentation Summit.

Virtual: September 13 to 16, 2026

The post Presentation Summit 2026: Conversation with Ilene Bergelson appeared first on PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff.

INSYNCR: Conversation with Kurt Dupont

Geetesh Bajaj — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 04:00:01 +0000

Kurt Dupont is a solution provider who would go out of his way just to ensure he brings out the best when it comes to issues that have to deal with data-driven presentations, data visualization, and digital signage software.

He started by working at airports worldwide to set up airport databases and flight information screens. This evolved to become the basis for his several add-ins.

In this conversation, Kurt talks about INSYNCR.

Geetesh: Kurt, what prompted the move from DataPoint to INSYNCR, and does the new brand represent more than just a rebranding?

Kurt: The honest version is that DataPoint had become two products long before we admitted it

For years we watched our customers split into two groups that never met.

Pushing Content. One group used DataPoint to push live data onto screens. Factory floors, airports, reception areas, control rooms. Their slides ran all day and nobody ever clicked through them.
Generating Content.The other group never looked at a screen at all. They pressed the Snapshot option and walked away with a stack of finished reports, every number pulled fresh from their database.

Same software, two completely different jobs. Every roadmap discussion turned into a tug of war between them. In 2023 we finally admitted what the roadmap had been telling us for years, and decided to split.

The screens went to SignageTube, which now has two editions, Cloud and Live. The reporting side became INSYNCR, and that is where my focus is. DataPoint from PresentationPoint was the company that got live data into PowerPoint. INSYNCR is about what our customers were actually using that for: reports and business documents where the numbers have to be right.

And that focus matters more now than ever. Twenty years ago the hard part was getting data into a slide. Today anything can generate a slide. AI will write you a beautiful deck in thirty seconds. The hard part left is trusting the number on it. A generated figure looks right. A bound figure is right, and you can click it and see exactly where it came from. That is the problem INSYNCR exists to solve, and it is a bigger problem in 2026 than it was in 2006.

Geetesh: What does the move to INSYNCR mean for existing customers of products such as DataPoint? Will their current templates, integrations, and workflows continue as before?

Kurt: Your files keep working. That was the rule we set for ourselves before anything else, because our customers have years of work inside their DataPoint presentations, and asking them to rebuild was never on the table.

The only thing you need to know is which side of the split you live on, and the test is simple:

If your DataPoint presentations feed screens, so TVs, dashboards, live displays that run on their own, your home is SignageTube Live.
If you press Snapshot, so you generate reports, documents or certificates from your data, your home is INSYNCR.

Some customers do both, and that is fine. It is the same data-binding engine underneath, just two roads instead of one.

We have customers who have run this technology for well over a decade, including operators in places like power plants where a wrong number on a screen is not a small thing. The test we held ourselves to was that on the day of the split, nothing broke for them. It did not.

If you are a DataPoint user and you are not sure where you belong, or what your licence path looks like, write to us. A human answers, usually the same day. And for readers who learned DataPoint from the tutorials here on Indezine: those tutorials are being updated to the INSYNCR workflow as we speak, so the guides you already know will keep matching the software.

Geetesh: What can existing and new customers expect from INSYNCR in the coming years?

Kurt: Let me answer the question I think is behind this one, because in 2026 it usually is: what about AI?

Here is how I see it. AI has made generating content free. What it has not made free is being right. Ask anyone who signs off a board deck, a client report or a compliance document. A plausible number is not the same as a correct one, and the more fluent the tools get, the more valuable provably correct becomes. INSYNCR sits deliberately on the correct side of that line. Every figure in an INSYNCR document is bound to a live source. You can inspect it. It cannot be invented.

So the direction for the coming years follows from that:

First, deeper and broader connections. We already bind PowerPoint to more than twenty live data sources, from Excel and SQL to cloud systems, and that list keeps growing, because customers keep bringing us new places their numbers live.
Second, beyond the deck. Our customers do not really want presentations, they want their reporting done. One asset management firm we work with used to have analysts copy-pasting numbers into slides the night before client meetings. Now the reports assemble themselves from live data, and about twenty colleagues simply open them, always current, always consistent. Another customer generates hundreds of certificates in a single run, every name and grade exactly right. No AI model can promise you that today. Deterministic generation can, and we have been doing it for years. Today that same engine runs everywhere from asset managers and industrial operators to research firms like Lumen Research, and you should expect it to reach more document types and more output formats over time.
Third, playing well with the AI tools your team already uses. Our view is simple: let AI do the drafting and the talking, and let INSYNCR be the layer that guarantees the numbers underneath. We want to be the trusted data layer in that stack, not a competitor to your copilot.

Our goal has not changed in twenty years, it has only become more urgent: your data is already correct in your systems. Everything built from it should be correct too, automatically, every time.

The post INSYNCR: Conversation with Kurt Dupont appeared first on PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff.

PowerPoint and Presenting News: September 1, 2026

Geetesh Bajaj — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 04:30:18 +0000

Good presentations are built on decisions made well before the room fills up. The widescreen 16:9 versus 4:3 article is one of those decisions: get it wrong and your slides shrink themselves in front of your audience. Tutorials on Gantt charts in Ampler, guide options in PowerPoint 365, and related tools round out the practical side of this issue. And then there is Presentation Summit 2026, running September 13 to 16, where our pre-conference conversations with Rick Altman, Nolan Haims, Mike Parkinson, and Robin Davis each push the same idea: clarity, evidence, and intention are what separate a presentation that lands from one that doesn’t.

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

The post PowerPoint and Presenting News: September 1, 2026 appeared first on PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff.