designslides.org

My college education at Nanyang Business School often requires me to do presentations on real-world business issues. The most recent case we were doing this time was on “The HP-Compaq Merger: A Battle for the Heart and Soul of A Company.”

Rather than the usual image intensive presentations my team mates are accustomed to when doing projects with me, we decided to go “professional” this time:

The template you see in the picture is the actual corporate template of HP that is used throughout its operating centers around the world.

This specially professional-looking template has been designed to create an uniform feel for all HP’s executives’ presentations. The concept was to make sure the company have a sense of congruence of its identity in all its presentations internally and externally. Read further down see some of the flexibilities embedded in the template.

Interesting? YOU can do the same thing. The secret lies within the friend of all college students:

The Google Search tool!

But simply typing “HP powerpoint template” won’t get you anywhere close to what you are looking for.

Get the right template on your powerpoint program in 5 simple steps:

1. At Google, type HP (or the name of the company you are researching on) and click on “Advance Search”

2. Under File Format, select Microsoft Powerpoint (ppt.)

What this does is it filters search results, leaving you only websites that hosts ppt. format files.

You can jump step by typing ” [ the company you are searching on] filetype: ppt’” on Google’s main page. E.g “HP Merger filetype:ppt” (without the quotation marks, of course)

3. Find the most authoritative looking link within the first two pages of the search results. A weblink starting with “www7.hp.com” definitely looks more promising than a site that begins with www.iabc.com”

4. Right click on the link and Save As. Open the file on your Microsoft Powerpoint and whola! - an all ready professional template for your presentation!

5. With a little bit of clever, I managed to uncover more gems having clicked on the “Design” tab (for MS Powerpoint 2007):

So that’s how you can get professional ppt templates in 5 minutes.

That’s not all - you can pull down the menu to save the “current theme” for your own reference in future.

That’s it!

Here’s a snapshot from the slide sorter view of our final presentation of our business case:

Impressed? My classmates certainly were.

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