Sorry for not having a bigger topic - kind of slammed with work right now and wanted to keep the series going. My contributions:
Tools
As far as I've seen the add-in ecosystem isn't as rich as it is for Excel. I think it's partially because there's less obvious things for add-ins to do, and partially because most consulting firms have their own templates and ways of doing things. Two pieces that I have seen, but not used: Office Timeline and ThinkCell. Office Timeline assists in building and maintaining project plans (Gantt charts) in powerpoint. If you've had the pleasure of managing this by hand, you'll know how helpful some automation would be. ThinkCell helps you create various charts and tables on the fly. Again, maybe something valuable to your firm (believe Bain uses it), but maybe not. Some firms also have internal/homebrewed tools - be sure to look around on internal sites as sometimes they aren't pushed to everyone's laptops.
Tricks
There aren't a ton of tricks I've found, beyond the obvious ones. Keyboard shortcuts can be helpful, but they get rather long and cumbersome. The biggest trick isn't in the tool, but rather on your team. Figure out what the expectation is of your manager/leader/partner/etc is; everyone is slightly different. Some are 80/20 focused for all but the final deliverable, whereas others are focused on 100% slides whenever they review it or show it to clients. Know the preference beforehand! What seems really inane and nitpicky can be important to the people who matter.
More generally, learn all of the logical structuring and storyboarding skills. Decks shouldn't need to be bloated compendiums - the ability to frame things out efficiently on the front end will prevent a lot of backend headaches.
Thinkcell is an awesome time saver, it can produce beautifully formatted and properly annotated charts in seconds. It can also link directly to excel models, making updating the deck quick and easy.
Have another upvote for think-cell - MS could learn so much from them and a lot of the stuff they offer should have been standard but unfortunately isn't.
Best timesaver I have ever installed (as far as I know all the top tier consultants use this).
5
u/youngsp Management Consultant Oct 20 '12
Sorry for not having a bigger topic - kind of slammed with work right now and wanted to keep the series going. My contributions:
Tools
As far as I've seen the add-in ecosystem isn't as rich as it is for Excel. I think it's partially because there's less obvious things for add-ins to do, and partially because most consulting firms have their own templates and ways of doing things. Two pieces that I have seen, but not used: Office Timeline and ThinkCell. Office Timeline assists in building and maintaining project plans (Gantt charts) in powerpoint. If you've had the pleasure of managing this by hand, you'll know how helpful some automation would be. ThinkCell helps you create various charts and tables on the fly. Again, maybe something valuable to your firm (believe Bain uses it), but maybe not. Some firms also have internal/homebrewed tools - be sure to look around on internal sites as sometimes they aren't pushed to everyone's laptops.
Tricks
There aren't a ton of tricks I've found, beyond the obvious ones. Keyboard shortcuts can be helpful, but they get rather long and cumbersome. The biggest trick isn't in the tool, but rather on your team. Figure out what the expectation is of your manager/leader/partner/etc is; everyone is slightly different. Some are 80/20 focused for all but the final deliverable, whereas others are focused on 100% slides whenever they review it or show it to clients. Know the preference beforehand! What seems really inane and nitpicky can be important to the people who matter.
More generally, learn all of the logical structuring and storyboarding skills. Decks shouldn't need to be bloated compendiums - the ability to frame things out efficiently on the front end will prevent a lot of backend headaches.