Duration: 9:34

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In this video interview, Trenna showcases some features of the Design Toolbars add-in for PowerPoint.

https://geetesh.in/design-toolbars

Hi Trenna, how are you today?

I am great. Thank you. Geetesh. It's good to see you.

The same here. Can you share something about your team that creates Design Toolbars?

Our team is rather small. It is myself and my colleague Davo Sime. Davo is the one behind the coding and I am the person that does everything else. So we share the load.

That's so awesome. There's always a reason when you create a wonderful add-in like this. So what motivated you to create Design Toolbars?

Well, Davo and I worked together for six years together at a large management consultancy and we created thousands of consulting type slides together. So we saw the need that when people left businesses like this that they did not have these tools in PowerPoint that they had in these big companies. And then we thought; we wrote it initially for ourselves because we do support PowerPoint works for a lot of these consultants. But we also then realized that students and academics and many other users of PowerPoint can actually benefit from our slide Design Tools.

Awesome. So I probably forgot to ask, where are you based out of?

We are in Sydney, Australia. So at the moment I'm in the city in Sydney and Davo works from home, from Bondi Beach, which is probably one of the greatest places in.

So, I'm going to request you to share your screen and show us a small demo of Design Toolbars.

Sure. So you'll see the Design Toolbars sit on the top left of the workspace in PowerPoint. Here we've got up to 30 to 51 slide Design Tools and then under our assets, we've got free flags, icons, maps, symbols and the template. So the template I have opened right now and you can see; it's just a very plain title-only slide. And you can see if I say new slide, it really only has this one Master layout that we use with Design Toolbars. What we did with our template, we actually included a few, sort of inspired by the types of slides that you can create with Design Toolbars. So, you can see that it goes through into formatting tables, charts, images. But today I'm going to show you this slide. So, this is our sort of visual enhancements that we have included in the program. Let me just pop in my main message of the slide, which this is a very consulting type plan template, but the templates can be changed very easily on the Master slide. Let me pop in to titles and you can see that the titles come in and here I can add below objects.

So, the way that we've written it, we've written up to six images, up to six elements, different details across the slide. And then what we do, we insert below. So we then pop in bullet points which are pre-formatted on the slide master. That makes it very easy for non-power users of PowerPoint to make a very structured, easy-to-understand slide.

And, then we've included charts. So, I can then say under Slide elements, I can insert a half-page chart. And all of our charts are actually linked to Excel and PowerPoint. So you can see you can use your internal color scheme to change the chart style. What we've also included here under our Charts and Tables toolbar is the ability to put on Bar Titles which is actually quite difficult in PowerPoint and also inserting a Data Row. And then we can set up this in Excel and then paste in the pre-formatted table data, which makes it really easy to do. As well, we've added in our Create Legend, either vertical or horizontal. So, I could put in my vertical legend or I could put in a Data Column. So, you can see that you can have a title and then the different labels for each series here.

So, here we can also put in our Last Bar labels: things that you can't do in PowerPoint. And then we also included some visual enhancements as well under Details. So, you can see here I can put in a Footer where we've also got the Quick Access toolbar and you can see that the text is aligned to the bottom. So if I want to put in my source as well, especially if I'm doing a chart, you'll see that the text is anchored to the bottom.

The other enhancements that we really like are the headers up on the top left here. They sort of refer to where you might be in a large deck in the agenda. So you don't have to use these, but we actually like them a lot. Then, we've also got the Stamps here. So you can put in up on the top right, the status of the slide. So it might be a confidential slide, and then also a sticky note which a lot of collaborative decks use as internal sort of messages between team-members.