An explain article

PowerPoint is considered by many employees in companies as a necessary evil. Very few can really get comfortable with the software, which is part of the Office suite available in most companies. The search for alternatives occupies many users who believe that primarily the software is to blame for the terrible slides. As if a car would be responsible for the damage in an accident. But seriously: it's not the program's fault. PowerPoint is one of the most powerful software applications that exist.

How is PowerPoint usage actually distributed in companies? There are numerous statistics on this. 60 percent of employees are PowerPoint users. And what do these users do? They create presentations that are 70 percent non-compliant with the brand. That should certainly not be the case. In most presentations, old slides are used. The search for them is the biggest time waster. When new slides are created, almost half of the time is spent on formatting work.

It might be good if PowerPoint could be made a little simpler to handle – and that's where add-ins come into play. Add-ins are additional programs that add more functions. These add-ons greatly simplify the work with PowerPoint and save the company time and money. Really.

I have recently been in frequent conversations with brand managers. When I showed them how to transform old slides into a new design in seconds with one click, they were speechless. How much time have employees wasted doing this manually so far? And moreover, the adaptations by employees, due to lack of knowledge about the corporate design, were often inadequate. What that means in terms of opportunity costs, most don't even want to know anymore.

A good add-in takes into account the system-stored corporate design and can integrate it into PowerPoint. There are warnings when the design is not correct – be it the colors or typography. Additionally, a central library with icons, images, or other items is available, managed uniformly. This way, no employee uses images they find somewhere on Google.

The result is that the slides are brand-compliant and existing slides can be automated to be brand-compliant. Very quickly.

Besides slide design, the simplicity in handling PowerPoint is another major topic in companies. With add-ins, for example, a company-tailored menu section can be provided with all relevant functions. This saves a lot of time searching for the right command. Additionally, add-ins manage to offer corresponding automations, for instance for quickly creating agendas or integrating tables from Excel.

And quite exciting: You can transfer slides from the old 4:3 format to 16:9 with one click without scaling errors, such as stretching images. Adjusting slides to other languages is also quickly possible. It's almost like magic.

The best part is that the right add-in can pay off pretty quickly. The ROI can be well over 1000 percent in the first year alone. However, this is not the case with every add-in. There are numerous offers on the market. We have tested many of them ourselves. For some time now, we have been working with what we believe is the best tool.

Many of our customers have now adopted this and are now creating uniform slides in no time and are enjoying it! No one would have thought this possible in connection with PowerPoint before.

PS: If you also want to save a lot of money, contact us. We'll show you how you too can introduce the right add-in...