PerfectIt for PowerPoint: A Joke Becomes a Dream
Daniel Heuman, CEO, PerfectIt
The first time that a customer told me they wanted PerfectIt for PowerPoint, I tried not to laugh. Our Chief Engineer and I joked about it. We even drew up a specification document for what it would look like. No matter what slide you ran it on, it would simply say “Use fewer words”.
Figure 1: Our joke version of PerfectIt for PowerPoint
However, the requests for PerfectIt for PowerPoint kept coming. We track every single request (no matter how odd it seems to us). We stopped joking when we reached five. At ten, we knew we had to understand more and we started researching it properly. At fifty requests, including from some of the biggest companies in the world, we started development.
We’re proud to say that the product we’re launching today is anything but a joke. It’s the culmination of years of work and we’re grateful to all of the users who helped us understand why it’s so important and then helped us make it happen.
PowerPoint is everywhere
I think of PowerPoint as a replacement for an overhead projector (because that’s how old I am).
Figure 2: A dinosaur (image source)
However, PowerPoint is so much more. And it’s used in more ways than many of us realize. From videos and infographics, to flyers and training materials, the way people use PowerPoint varies enormously.
Reports in PowerPoint
I write reports in Word. I didn’t understand that there are sectors and roles where everyone writes reports in PowerPoint. For many people, it’s more convenient and easier than desktop publishing tools. Moreover, it makes it easy to switch between document and audio-visual presentation.
The demands that documents in PowerPoint create on editors is enormous. One small editing team described a two-week period where they had to turn around 200 PowerPoint decks. Tools to help are limited and each edit is more time-consuming than working in Word.
Our medical communications users described poster sessions and infographics that are crucial to communicating science. Our proposal writing users described how PowerPoint can be their tool of choice both for presentations and sometimes for proposal submissions. The need is everywhere.
Mistakes writ large
It’s not just the nature of documents that makes PowerPoint challenging for editors, it’s the visibility of errors. With PowerPoint decks, any mistakes are literally projected on to an enormous screen and appear large enough for people at the back of a room to see! Small mistakes like consistency errors pop out at the audience and undermine the presenter. And unlike documents (where many people skim through it), the mistake can stay on the screen for minutes before the next slide comes along.
Dream becomes reality
That combination of user requests, difficult documents and high stakes convinced us of the need for a PowerPoint version. However, that doesn't make it easy to deliver! PerfectIt makes use of the structure of a document to identify things like capitalization inconsistency and acronyms that need definitions. Most documents have a similar structure. In PowerPoint, the structure varies enormously. Each deck is completely different. We didn’t know how a consistency checker could possibly work if there’s no consistency to start with!
PerfectIt for PowerPoint has taken more than two years of development. We’ve tackled problems one at a time, from basic consistency through to tables and other complex document issues. And we’re still working on it. The initial release doesn’t include the checks for bullets and lists (they are coming soon).
As we’ve built PerfectIt for PowerPoint, we’ve kept an eye on the future. We’ve built a new interface. We’ve made it more accessible for users with visual impairments. The release is for PCs with Windows only, but we’ve used technologies that will help us bring this to Mac users in time.
The Chicago Manual of Style in PowerPoint for the first time
We’re delighted that our partnership with The Chicago Manual of Style extends to PowerPoint. If you have a subscription to CMOS Online, then you can link the two for no additional cost. That means your presentations not only have consistency checking, but have the very best guidance for the words you choose and how you present them.
Enforce your house style in PowerPoint
Best of all, if you’ve customized PerfectIt for Word to check your house style then all of your house style rules will immediately work in PowerPoint. There are no extra steps. Your house style will be visible in the dropdown list of styles when you run PerfectIt for PowerPoint.
Try it now!
PerfectIt for PowerPoint is included in our Elite, Team, and Enterprise tiers. If you’re already on one of those subscriptions, you get PerfectIt for PowerPoint without paying anything extra. Simply get the latest version online or speak to your IT team about installation.