The Slide shall serve The Master

The Master is the Master

Don’t we all have to serve someone or something? Don’t we all have to follow rules and guidelines? Especially in professional fields…?

Marketing and corporate communications are considered an exciting work environment. You can work creatively, come up with appealing campaigns, create graphics or have them created. getting involved again and again, writing texts and strategically thinking about how to communicate something in the best and most efficient way.

It gets funny when you agree on terms internally but then work with an external agency. Especially in the field of communication, many terms are misused or simply confused, but let’s stick to our core, PowerPoint.

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„We will send you our PowerPoint Master“ say customers and we receive slide collections.

Minime character as a metaphor for the slide serving its presenter

The term „master,“ for example, has been an occasional misunderstanding between marketing departments and design agencies for many years. Often, companies refer to a collection of PowerPoint slides, most of which are used internally and externally to represent the company and company data, as their „master file.“ If the employees are not that proficient in PowerPoint, they are also not entirely familiar with what the master really is.

Cookies and Cutters

Presenter speaking in front of a projected presentation slide

The PowerPoint Master is the technical foundation, the cookie cutter, so to speak.

It makes it easier to keep the slides of a presentation consistent and easier to edit. The positioning of the headings, the content area and the footers can be secured by a predefined dimensioning. The in-house color tones, as well as desired fonts and font sizes, defined list levels and line spacing facilitate the company-compliant presentation of the content.

The PowerPoint Master is thus what lies behind the presentation. Thanks to the layouts defined in the Master, designing presentations should actually no longer be a problem.

Or is it?

Let’s now take a look at the matching cookies. Almost every company has an individual and defined master so that presentation creation is made easier. But in corporations, colleagues always come up with funny things. Many bring their personal touch, which sometimes makes it difficult for the corporate design crew to release these presentations. Poorly resolved images sticking out of the content area, headlines shifted or displayed in a different font, the color palette ignored, funny screenshots from the web slapped into the slides, which not only looks ugly, but could be plain illegal.

It’s actually so easy to stick to the master and its specifications and yet… there are the rebels, the slide ragers, the design despisers.

Recently I read in a post by my colleague Peter-Claus Lamprecht that his client didn’t want his PowerPoint to look too good, because then people would think of him that he cared more about the look than the content. It’s funny our corporate world. On the one hand, you want full professionals with charismatic self-promotion skills who look the part as leaders, and on the other hand, it devalues them to do the same on all levels.

Design is not everything, but nothing is anything without design!

I didn’t want to digress now, though. So why does every company have a mold for creating even cookies – even presentations?

Right, so that the corporate identity, the identity of the company, so to speak, its essence is guaranteed in the presentation. So that its face can be recognized, internally and externally. So that everyone feels integrated under a common flag.

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Let’s take our current favorite German company, Lufthansa.

If I put on a white blouse, a dark blue blazer, a dark blue skirt and wrap a yellow scarf around my neck, everyone would think I work for Lufthansa.

Point made, right?

So design and colors, external presentation and uniformity is not to be underestimated!

Now let’s also talk about the burnt flip side of the cookie and the deformation and abuse of the patty

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First of all: I believe that PowerPoint should REALLY be trained in every company and every employee who has an office job. PowerPoint is accessible to EVERYONE and yes, there are many who bash it and even those who demonize it to the point that they’d rather scribble like mad on flip charts and declare PowerPoint dead…🤮 Yes, that very squad….

But it is and remains indispensable to deal with PowerPoint in the company, because it is still the software in which you can communicate the fastest and easiest.

Why should you train PowerPoint when it is actually so easy?

Here: an example from practice.

„I can’t send you the presentation by e-mail, it’s too big“.

„There were only four slides, why can’t you send them by mail?“

Here is the reason, after I opened the master behind the four slides:

Better use of PowerPoint should be trained for reasons like this alone, so that you have a better understanding of the technical basis of the presentation.

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You don’t have to be an artist to create beautiful, purposeful presentations. First and foremost, you just need to ask yourself a few simple questions:

If, contrary to expectations, it doesn’t work then, there is always support on the web from presentation experts like us.

We are happy about every rescued slide, every preserved corporate design and every successful presentation.

If you have any questions about creating a PowerPoint master or reviewing existing presentations, please feel free to contact us at any time. We look forward to hearing from you.

Daniela Lopez

Author (hover to contact)