What Amtrak Can Teach Us About Presentation Standards: How to Create Professional Presentations in Less Time

by | Aug 30, 2018 | Presentation Design, Presentation Templates

I took the train from Richmond to New York twice last summer. It’s doesn’t take much longer than flying, it’s a lot less hassle, and you can get more work done. But there’s one thing that drives me crazy. When you get to Washington, DC, you wait in the dark with no power for 20 minutes while they swap out the engine. Imagine if airlines operated this way. “This is your captain speaking. We’ll be landing shortly in DC to swap out the engines.” What gives, Amtrak? Well, it turns out that most of Amtrak’s trains are diesel, except in the northeast, where they are electric. “Twenty minutes, no big deal,” you say. The average Amtrak train has 290 passengers. Every day, 85 trains leave DC. That’s 24,650 passengers per day. Multiply by 365 days per year and 0.33 hours per engine change and that’s 2,969,092 HOURS WASTED per year. 3 million hours per year spent sitting on a dark train. Feel free to argue with my math, but you’ll still get a crazy-big number. Presentations aren’t trains, but a lack of standardization wastes millions of hours every year. You’ve experienced this waste if you’ve ever had to: 

  • Reformat someone else’s slide when you copied it into your presentation 
  • Reformat your presentation to comply with your company’s brand standards 
  • Built a slide from scratch that you’ve built before, but couldn’t find 

Standards  

When we all agree to do something the same way, that’s a standard. The rules of grammar are an example of a standard (though these standards change over time). Brand departments typically set standards for your company logo and how to use it. Here’s how to leverage presentation standards in your organization: 

  • Incorporate your Brand Standards into your presentation templates. And load those templates on everyone’s computer. Leveraging the brand font and color palette means you spend less time picking fonts and colors (and you ensure they don’t clash).  
  • Pick a style guide and stick with it. I like the AP Style Guide, but the key is getting everyone to use the same one. This will save all that time you spent arguing with your co-workers on whether to use the Oxford Comma. 
  • Set internal standards for how you refer to products, projects, and departments. Apple is very clear that it’s an “iPhone,” not an Iphone or an IPhone or an IPHONE or an iphone or an iPhOnE (I could go on). Fun fact: having a capital letter in the middle of a word is called “camel case.” 

Standard Templates  

What happens when you hit File, New, Blank Presentation in PowerPoint? If it looks like this, you don’t have a standard template, or you didn’t make it easy for everyone in your organization to use it. 

Here are some best practices for templates:

  • Don’t use the Featured templates in PowerPoint (there goes my PowerPoint MVP award). Most of them are noisy and take up prime real estate with stuff. Slide Carnival has some decent templates. 
  • Don’t have too many templates. You may decide you need more than one template (e.g., internal and external use), but every template you add is a deal with the devil. Invariably, someone will want to use a slide from the standard, white background, internal template in a widescreen, blue, template for an external audience and all heck will break loose. 
  • Incorporate good design principles. Set standard font sizes for titles, bullets, and text boxes. Set line spacing greater than 1. Use guidelines to set margins around the page. Have a color palette that’s consistent with your brand. Coolers has a simple color-palette generator.  
  • Incorporate helpful tools for users, like software shortcuts and checklists. 

Slide Libraries   

Build out a slide library so individuals don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time they need to create a line chart, or a scatter plot, or a slope graph, or a pyramid framework (I could go on). Not only does this save time, but it creates a consistent look-and-feel. The big consultants know this. That presentation you paid a million dollars for was made up of slides they created for another client then updated with your data. Here’s how to build a slide library: 

  • Start with an effective standard template. If your slide library requires reformatting with every use, it’s worthless. 
  • Build as many slides as you can, as long as you… 
  • … make it easy to access slides. Label them clearly to enable search. Group them – the 2-box framework should be with the 3-box framework and the 4-box framework. 
  • Put it somewhere everyone can find it. Load it onto everyone’s computer and put it on the intranet.  

Each day, 30 million PowerPoint presentations are given. I estimate (conservatively) the average presentation takes 4 hours to prepare and effective standards can save 15% of that time. That’s 18 million hours that standards can save every day. That’s 821 million workdays per year. Perhaps not coincidentally, American workers let 662 million vacation days go unused in 2016. Create standards for your team/organization and we can all go back to taking the vacation days we earned! 

Postscript: My wife and son took Amtrak to New York last week and they had to wait 39 minutes for the engine change in D.C. And it was 91 degrees. 

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