Power-Up Newsletter 05

It’s Tuesday and time to discover how to make your presentations pop✨

Investor presentations need a shake-up. They don’t exactly scream sexy and innovative. This month we’ll do a mini-series on how the biggest companies share results.

In the spotlight today, we look at how Elon Musk shared the latest Tesla results at their Annual Shareholder Meeting.

Let’s get right into it!

In this edition:

🎓 Learn: Next-level bullet point reveal used by big tech companies
💻 Presentation Breakdown: Tesla 2023 Annual Shareholder Meeting
💡 Idea: Look for opportunities to be an amateur

🎓 Learn: Next-level bullet point reveal used by big tech companies

Both Google and Apple used this simple and natural bullet point reveal at their developer conferences this year. It’s elegant and really elevates your slide:

From 2023 Apple WWDC

From 2023 Google I/O conference

Let me show you how to build this for your own PowerPoint presentations.

How to:

As simple as this looks, there are a few important tools that bring it all together. The most critical of which is the Morph Transition effect.

If you’ve never heard of the Morph Transition, then hold onto your hats. It’s probably the single most used animation effect by professional presentation designers in PowerPoint. It helps to get that cinematic look by allowing you to animate smooth movement from one slide to the next.

Step 1: Begin with the end in mind

The best tip for using the Morph Transition is to begin with the end in mind. I often work backwards and mock up the final slide. In this case, it is a 5 bullet-point slide
Create a text box that you will use as a template for each of your bullet points. Chose the size, font and colour (I used gradient text fills here)
Duplicate the template text box 4 more times using Ctrl+D or by copying and pasting
Arrange the text boxes using Distribute Vertically to create equidistant spacing
Select all the text boxes and Align to Centre. They will now be aligned to a common centre axis

Create your end template or slide to visualise the final outcome

Group all the text boxes and Align to Middle of the slide. Then Ungroup the text boxes. This will ensure that the text boxes are positioned in the middle of the slide

Align the bullets to the middle of the slide to create the focal point

Step 2: Set Appearance Animation

Apply the Fade animation to the last text box. We will be revealing each bullet point (text box) individually per slide
Tweak the settings to get the Fade In effect that you would like. Here I chose it to start With Previous and to animate text By word

The Fade animation can be customised to get the desired effect. I love the By Word setting for text

Step 3: Setting up the Morph

We are now ready to apply The Morph Transition and take it up a level

The Morph Transition creates a fluid motion between how objects (like shapes, images or text) change between two slides. The key is to use the exact same objects and PowerPoint takes care of matching the changes between the slides
To make this happen, first set Morph Transition for your current slide. Remember that animations are for objects on a slide, while Transitions are animation effects between slides
Tweak the settings by reducing Duration to 0.75 seconds

Set up your Morph on one slide and it will be consistent across all slides that are created from this template

Step 4: Creating the Duplicate

It’s now time to duplicate the slide to bring the Morph Transition into effect. Use Ctrl+D or copy and paste the slide
We are working backwards now, so select the newer slide
Select the lowest bullet point (i.e. text box) > remove the Fade effect > move the text box to the bottom of the slide > recolour it to match the font colour to the slide background. This will make the text box seem invisible and also have it seem to appear from the bottom of the slide
Group the other 4 text boxes, Align to Middle, Ungroup and apply the Fade effect as in Step 2

Morph Transition highlights all the changes between objects on slides

Step 5: Test your Morph

Before duplicating this to the rest of the slides, you can test how well the transition works. Put it into slideshow mode from your first bullet slide and navigate between the two slides
This is the Morph Transition at work 😁

Test your animations or transitions before building the rest of the slides

Step 6: Rinse and repeat

Now that you have the idea of what Morph does to objects across slides you can repeat step 4 above for the rest of the slides
Duplicate the slide > Select the earlier slide > Remove the Fade animation > Move the bottom-most text box to the bottom of the slide > Recolour text > Regroup the remaining text boxes > Align to Middle > Ungroup > Apply Fade animation to bottom bullet
You should have 5 slides in total. Each slide will provide the animation per bullet point. The only difference is the Fade animation for the first slide will start On Click

The final slide effect. Transforming your bullet points into something pretty cool

And that is how you can create this awesome bullet point reveal that the biggest tech companies in the world use.

💡Pro-Tip: This slide effect works best with 3 to 5 bullet points. I would not recommend more than 5

Read the original post here on the blog

💻 Presentation Breakdown: Tesla 2023 Annual Shareholder Meeting

Tesla, the world’s largest electric car company in sales and the largest automaker by market value, held its Annual Shareholder meeting on May 16, 2023.

A big drawcard for me was getting to see CEO Elon Musk deliver his Year in Review presentation. Shareholder Meetings don’t exactly stand out as exciting events. However, this almost 2hr long event was a bit different from the norm.

What can we learn from this presentation?

Elon Musk delivering the Year in Review presentation

ℹ️ About:

Who: To an audience of Shareholders and Investors

What: Tesla performance for the year and future outlook

Where: Tesla Headquarters in Austin Texas

How: Livestream presentation by the Tesla team with slides, video segments and audience Q&A

Audience responding to who has tried the Full Self Driving beta

🏗️ Structure:

The keynote was split into 5 distinct sections (plus timestamps):

Introduction: by Martin Viecha Head of Investor Relations (from 00:00:00 to 00:02:26)
Greeting: by Robyn Denholm Chair of the Board of Directors (from 00:02:26 to 00:09:48)
Meeting Called to Order plus Proposals: by Martin Viecha Head of Investor Relations (from 00:09:48 to 00:22:35)
Year in Review: by Elon Musk CEO (from 00:22:35 to 00:59:30)
Q&A: by Elon Musk CEO (from 00:59:30 to 01:49:52)

✅ Swipe: What worked

It’s a lot easier when things are going well: This goes without saying. It’s easier to give good news than bad news. Tesla is far ahead of other Electric Vehicle manufacturers and doing so profitably. The energy in the audience and the tone of the speakers echoed that

This slide clearly articulates how far ahead of the competition Tesla is

Focus on key messages: A typical results presentation can sometimes get carried away walking everyone through the financials. The approach used by Tesla was to capture key messages like production and profitability metrics and always bring the focus back to the product. There were necessary formalities, but even in the opening by Robyn Denholm, it was all about the product and the success stories (from the production at the Austin Gigafactory to the new launches)

This slide could have been a line chart, but this version does allow you to compare much easier across the years

Very simple slide design: It’s easy to get caught up in the high production factor from Apple and Google, but in the Year in Review section, there were very simple slides, no animation and it was all about the key message per slide. Elon Musk used the slides to support his presentation while his script remained the focal point
Here are a few slides for inspiration:

Might not be the best image, but it immediately focused your attention back to the speaker

Very clear callouts on the impact of the new Drive Unit technology

Great idea to create comparisons which surprise and challenge conventional ideas

🙅 Dodge: What to avoid

Elon is a bit weird: I guess we can’t be surprised by that. What struck me is how different he is in presentations vs. interviews. He is not exactly an electrifying speaker (see what I did there 😅) but it didn’t make a difference to the audience. He is definitely captivating in his own way. Not all of us are lucky enough to have such a loyal following. For everyone else, ensure that the speaker keeps the energy up

Not often that you get this kind of welcome as a speaker 😅

Not all slides work: In prepping this review, I watched the presentation a couple of times and even had a look through the slide deck separately. On the first review, the slides are perfectly fine when you read them on your own (i.e. they work as a slidedoc). However, there were a few slides that did not translate well when presenting. Too much text or slides that did not have high-contrast visuals made it hard to read on the presentation screen. I highly recommend rehearsing the final slides to see how these will show up to the audience. There is always risk in building slides in isolation and not understanding how they will be received during the live event. If you have access to the event location, do yourself a favour and test if the entire audience can see your visuals

The idea is sound, but the difference between the two sides is not as noticeable. I found myself counting the columns just to make sure they weren’t the same. Make it obvious with a label

Too much text and not enough contrast between the text colour and background made this slide really difficult to read

A really interesting presentation. The team were clear about the company mission and reiterated it many times during the presentation. The audience members were also on that mission so the presentation landed extremely well. The future outlook looks really bright for Tesla.

The one slide that stuck with me (besides that Tesla is way ahead of other EV manufacturers) is the end-state for a fully sustainable energy economy:

A Fully Sustainable Energy Economy is within our reach

Watch the full keynote (1hr 50min including Q&A)
Here’s a direct link to the slides
If you’ve never heard of Tesla’s Master Plan, here is the latest paper

I’ve been studying presentations by some of the largest companies and best speakers to find secrets that we can apply to our daily presentations at work.

Do you have a favourite speaker you’d like to see featured? Reply to this mail and I’ll add them to the list

💡 Idea: Look for opportunities to be an amateur

“The thing is, you never really start over. You don’t lose all the work that’s come before. Even if you try to toss it aside, the lessons that you’ve learned from it will seep into what you do next.
So don’t think of it as starting over. Think of it as beginning again.”
– Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!

This is from one of my favourite reads of 2022. I’ve thought a lot about what Austin Kleon is saying here, especially with regard to the topic of failure.

How can we reframe having to shut down a project or pivot to a new direction when we realise that things just aren’t working out as planned?

It’s in the nature of the work we do. As knowledge workers, we are crafting ideas, building on concepts, and applying theories to the real world.

In a lot of cases, we will get things wrong. We will need to rework an idea and redo slides for the 25th time. It can be extremely frustrating!

But with all change (even with the occasional f-up) the message I’ve taken from this quote is: You don’t ever lose.

You never ever really start over from scratch. All you do is get the opportunity to begin again and to make room for new ideas.

Skills compound. Views evolve. You learn more with each experience. And this experience can’t be lost and can always be applied to future situations.

Not trying. Not getting back up or giving up. That is when you really lose.

When you try to see the world through what Austin Kleon is saying: You always have the opportunity to begin again. To become a student again, learn new things and make room for new ideas to be brought to life – and that’s a pretty exciting way to look at things.

That’s all for Edition #05⚡️

Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a great week!

✌️ + ppt

Fareed.

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