“I didn’t know if I wanted to cry or laugh knowing how many wasted hours I’ve spent designing decks,” is a line your CFO does not want to hear! Unfortunately, whether people admit it or not, this is a universal problem. The productivity lost tinkering with presentations is staggering. Every time we manually adjust shapes, text, or colors, another few minutes is wasted. This is precious time that could be spent on enriching ideas, data analysis, and most importantly, the strategy behind the message. Just think, if each employee at your company loses two hours a week on formatting shapes or pictures, it could add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Yikes!
And then there is the immeasurable loss of brand currency. Presentations are important brand vehicles. They are what bring your employees’ ideas, updates, and strategic plans to life. Think about how often your presentation is the first introduction a sales prospect gets to your brand. And yet, most companies miss this branding opportunity, investing next to nothing in this asset. PowerPoint templates—if they are good—can be worth their weight in gold. Unfortunately though, most aren’t.
Most Templates are a Hot Mess
People depend heavily on presentation templates to look good and to show off their brand, but most just don’t function well. These clunky presentations are usually caused by a poorly-built PowerPoint template. And whether they are built by a design agency or purchased off the Internet, poor templates do a lot of damage.
Design Agencies are No Panacea
Design agencies are hired to create eye-catching PowerPoint templates. And yes, designers are often visually skilled and well-versed in your brand. But they don’t necessarily understand how to translate that brand into a functional presentation environment. These templates look pretty, but they can’t easily be edited by the average employee. (Mac-centric) design agencies are the first to admit, they don’t really understand Office products like PowerPoint. Here are some of the messier problems design agencies run into:
- They struggle with what you can and can’t do with color using PowerPoint templates, such as how color choices impact tables and charts.
- They don’t use ‘safe’ fonts that hold up in different presentation environments. When presentations are emailed to other machines (across operating systems) those beautiful layouts turn into a design mess.
- They often don’t understand how their layouts look on large projection screens or mobile devices. This can render files unreadable.
- They don’t know how to properly build templates (which, by the way, takes over 100 steps to be done correctly).
Off-the-Shelf Templates Aren’t Functional (and They Don’t Even Look Good!)
Great templates are so much more than just prettified slides. Off-the-shelf templates do not include your branding, colors, fonts, graphic shapes, images, voice or tone… so your designers or employees will still need to do a lot of editing to incorporate your brand. Off-the-shelf templates function poorly when trying to make adjustments to colors, text, font, and charts. Colors don’t match, fonts don’t translate, and don’t get us started on the meaningless charts and diagrams!
Functional, Stylish Presentation Templates That Will Make Your Brand Shine
What is the point of presentation templates? Aren’t they meant to allow people to save time preparing their ideas while keeping style and branding in place? We believe people should be focused on their ideas and stories, not the mechanics of building the deck. They should have little to do but pick an ideal layout and plug in text, numbers, or graphics. No sizing fonts. No inserting text boxes. No looking for colors. No formatting bullets. Bottom line: templates must be easy to edit, highly visual, and functionally sound.
TPC offers a full collection of beautifully designed layouts, programmed on the back and front end. We understand the mechanics of PowerPoint templates because we are supported by Microsoft MVPs, those who know the application inside and out.
If you want your team to stop spending 6-8 hours developing a presentation, a robust presentation template is where to start. When built correctly, templates increase employee productivity, help people communicate more strategically, and finally they are a vital investment in your brand.
Interested in better productivity and branding through custom templates? Call us at 888-991-0208 or see more information about custom templates here.