In the productivity tools space, Microsoft Office has shown an incredible adoption in the last decade, becoming the number one choice among fortune 500 companies and individual professionals. Microsoft Office suite (and its new cloud service Office 365) has more than 1.2 billion subscribers worldwide, making it the most deployed productivity suite in history.
PowerPoint, the presentations software provided by Microsoft Office, has become so popular, that its name is used as a synonym for. It’s popularity is based on its simplicity and powerful features allowing traditional users to manipulate complex graphic design properties in a simple and intuitive interface. But even though the tool is great, flexible and extremely easy to use, it requires professional design knowledge and skills in order to create impressive presentation decks, that stand out from the rest. Even more, creating appealing presentations with great graphics is not only a complex task, but it requires time.
Traditional presenters lack of time, lack of knowledge and even lack of patience to create outstanding presentation decks. This reality generates low visual quality decks which instead of reinforcing or complementing a great presentation, they downgrade it.
With the objective of helping PowerPoint users to create business PowerPoint presentations with the visual appeal of professional artists, but with little investment of time is that SlideModel.com is born.
In this article we will review SlideModel.com, its value proposition and its benefits among the space of PowerPoint templates. We will cover common usage scenarios, highlight the benefits for the traditional user and show how it can help to create decks of publishing quality.
Introducing SlideModel Value Proposition
SideModel.com was born in 2014 as an answer for PowerPoint users that required great visuals for business presentations, but did not have the time to invest in the design of their presentation decks. The tool started targeting professionals and executives providing a wide gallery of business PowerPoint templates. With the objective of servicing their customers with industry leading graphics and a superb customer support, SlideModel grew their gallery based on customers suggestions and needs. Nowadays, SlideModel’s gallery provides more than 10,000 graphics with a special target on business models, frameworks and data-driven visualization. The catalog is constantly growing and reinventing itself based on current design and business trends.
The major benefit of SlideModel’s PowerPoint Templates is their flexibility. Each template is 100% editable; it is created with PowerPoint native objects. This feature allows every user to fully customize the templates properties ranging from colors, effects, size, theme and data, without affecting the visual quality or resolution. Even more, if the user requires matching the template to their own corporate theme, it is just a matter of including their theme into PowerPoint and apply it to the template. All PowerPoint Shapes can be adapted to match existing presentations, so users can include Shapes and objects from different templates to build their own custom versions, just dragging and dropping.
An important feature valued by all segments of SlideModel users is the quality of the aesthetics and design. In order to catch up with modern design trends, SlideModel designers team applies professional publishing techniques in every template layout and of course they provide new design techniques as Flat Design, Material Design, Layered 3D Effects, Long Shadow effects, Thin Line icons, etc. Everyone can navigate the online gallery and find out how modern and trendy all designs look. Every detail of the look and feel is kept under the radar. This attention to detail is one of the main differentiators of their products.
SlideModel is created as a simple web platform; users can log in, browse the templates based on categories or search keywords, download their files and create their own presentations. All categories are built under a simple structure, and they can be navigated in a paged style. The following sections present a brief description of each category group and a common usage scenario of their content.
PowerPoint Templates
This category provides a full view of the gallery content. It is sorted by upload date, allowing the user to see the latest gallery additions. Users can navigate the category and look for inspiration within a wide range of topics. Under the PowerPoint templates category, users can filter through sub-categories as Business PowerPoint Templates, Strategy PowerPoint Templates, Marketing PowerPoint Templates, Startup Presentation Tools, etc.
A very popular scenario within the Business PowerPoint Templates is the SWOT Analysis. SWOT (or sometimes called TOWS) is a popular management tool used in the Strategy Planning process of every company or startup. The tool is very popular for its simplicity and power. The tool identifies internal and external factors that are categorized as, Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. SlideModel provides a wide range of SWOT Analysis options ready to edit with the user’s content. In some cases, the templates are shared through PowerPoint online in order to collaborate during the analysis.
PowerPoint Diagrams
PowerPoint diagrams are a helpful alternative to bullet lists and tables. They provide a visually appealing structure to concepts and their matching relationships. Users can describe processes, structures and flows in ways that reinforce the relationships explained by the presenter. This category is broken down based on the diagram layout, for example circular diagrams, process diagrams, tree diagrams, funnel diagrams, etc. There is no topic that cannot be explained by a diagram. When SlideModel users start to replace their traditional lists or tables with modern diagrams, they realize how powerful an image can be in the task of explaining complex scenarios, processes or situations.
Digital marketing teams are a traditional segment among SlideModel subscribers. They employ the power of PowerPoint diagrams in order to create professional Infographics. The following template is a good example of this use case. Users can modify the number of steps and even replace the icons with another option that fits the need.
Maps Templates
PowerPoint Maps are extremely helpful to present global strategies, trading routes, branch placements, etc. SlideModel Maps gallery is comprehensive and up to date. Users can find individual countries with their own state’s political outlines and regional maps (political and economical). Each map is created as a composite of individual subregions, allowing the user to ungroup the map and customize a region or state appearance to highlight it from the rest.
The United States Map is one of the most popular Maps templates in the gallery. Users can individually edit each of the US states and highlight them in the big picture. Users an open each of the product pages of the gallery and browse the slides of the template before downloading it.
PowerPoint Shapes
Modern visual presentation decks require the use of professional shapes, this includes PowerPoint Icons, Flat Design Shapes and of course different Scenes created with modern vectors. Users can describe metaphors combining shapes or build scenes that reinforce their message. Shapes are a complementing tool in every presentation, adding visual cues to the audience to understand or contextualize a message. As described before, all shapes are customizable; for example, users can drag and drop icons from the templates and change their color or effect to match the new presentation.
The following example shows a Professional PowerPoint Template with editable vectors featuring office materials. The shapes are created entirely as PowerPoint shapes, using flat design style.
Data & Charts
The times of presenting long tables with numbers and hundreds of data points have passed. Nowadays presentations cannot be created as a copy paste from a spreadsheet or a report into a slide. The user needs to summarize and express numbers and metrics in a way the audience can understand and even more, be able to analyze in a glimpse in order to take decisions. SlideModel comes to the rescue with a professional set of Dashboards and Charts ready to customize with the user’s own data. Taking advantage of PowerPoint and Excel integration, SlideModel, created charts that can be populated with Excel tables, allowing the user to express accurate values based on their own data and calculations. Users can find in this category templates with a different set of useful charts (Bar Chart, Column Charts, Pie & Donut Charts, Waffle Chart, 3D Chart, etc.) and with themed dashboards, ideal for presenting KPI’s and Metrics.
As an example, we selected the following Dashboard template. It is ideal for showing information about any business. It includes:
- A column chart with a single series, ideal for representing monthly sales
- A column chart with two series, intended to show a comparison like KPI, as revenue versus cost
- A donut chart and waffle chart that can be used for market share data.
- A multiple line chart ideal for comparing different item values across time.
- Venn Diagrams for describing competition and market analysis
- An editable world map intended to highlight the countries with sales.
- Finally, an org chart to describe your management team structure.
Timelines and Planning
One of the most common use cases in today’s corporate world is the presentation of business reviews and project roadmaps. User requires easy to adapt professional PowerPoint timeliness to show the progress over roadmaps and plans. SlideModel provides a wide range of options from formal timelines to more casual roadmaps.
The following example shows a project timeline, represented in a Gantt Chart.
PowerPoint Template Backgrounds
Sometimes, you need just to fill in the blanks and create beautiful presentations. SlideModel provides a set of “fits all” general purposes backgrounds in order to fill in the blanks with your information. Users can find several themed backgrounds for corporate presentations, real estate, medicine, logistics, retail, schools and education, etc.
Subscribing to SlideModel
SlideModel provides several plans & pricing to fit different needs. The target audience could be classified by the following usages scenarios:
- One time User: If you need a specific PowerPoint Template from SlideModel, or a small set to craft your presentation, you can subscribe to the One Day Access Plan and download your specific need. This plan targets one time users that need to create a great presentation in one shot.
- Presenters with mid-term needs: If you are a presentation designer or just a presenter that is working on a project with an end date; a mid-term plan subscription might fit your needs. SlideModel provides plans with short-term renewal options that do not force users to long-term commitment, but provides extensive downloads for a short period of time. An example would be a quarterly plan, where the user can cancel any time; while the plan is active it will renew avoiding service interruption, when the user feels that is no longer in need of the service, it can cancel without further charges.
- Continuous Presenters: If you create presentations with a regular pace, for sure the long terms plans of SlideModel will fit your need. Not only because of the extremely convenient pricing for annual plans, but also for the amount of downloads and personalized customer support.
- Agencies or Businesses: If you want seat licences for your agency or your business, SlideModel provides team accounts that will fit your needs. Team users can share their templates and even upload them directly to the cloud. Team accounts also receive additional benefits as Slide Bundles and PowerPoint plugins that will help presenters productivity.
The SlideModel subscription provides a perpetual license. This means that even after your SlideModel.com subscription has expired, users can continue to use the templates they downloaded. For the Annual and Team accounts, users can even login to the platform and redownload all the templates they previously acquired without further cost.
Final Thoughts
We have reviewed SlideModel as a templates gallery and as a tool for users of PowerPoint. Even though the main target of SlideModel is presenters that use PowerPoint, the gallery is wide enough to be used as a collection of assets for Digital Marketing campaigns (as SlideShare or Slidedocs). Even more, SideModel’s templates are compatible with Keynote and Google Slides, making it a great tool for every designer.
Hope you have enjoyed the review. Please leave your comments.
Step 3: You can look at a preview of the video by right-clicking on the video file. If the video is a long one, and you do not want to show the entire video in your presentation, then you can trim and show just a section.
Step 4: You can basically, choose the section which you want to show in your presentation. Once the selection is made, Just hit the OK button.
Step 2: This will give you a dialog to insert a link of the video. You can copy the embed code from YouTube (or any other websites) and paste it into the textbox below (as shown)
On clicking the Insert Button, you will find the YouTube video inserted in the Slide. You can resize it as per your need..!
You also have options to change the Video Styles, Correct the brightness and Contrast etc..