Make Slide Templates helps you avoid Frankensteined slides. (Not Jacob-Elordi-in-Frankenstein cute. But a monstrous mess: a mix of fonts, colors, and styles. Pieced together. Barely alive.)
You deserve better! Presentations that look professional and streamlined. Built carefully and intentionally. Skimmable. Accessible.
Templates also eliminate the “stare at a blank slide” tax. You start with a ready-made structure that does the heavy lifting for you.
Templates save hours of formatting time. A good template bakes in hierarchy, spacing, and structure—so you can focus on your message, not nudging text boxes pixel by pixel.
Templates scale your best design practices across the whole org. Even non‑designers can produce clean, on‑brand slides because the template does the heavy lifting.
You can hire a graphic designer to fight with the Slide Master for you. Sure, you can hire me directly. Or, I can refer you to someone good.
Or, you can make them yourself.
Make Slide Templates is a bonus half-day training that's available when you register for Powerful Presentations by March 14. You'll have lifetime access to the step-by-step instructions, plus a variety of PowerPoint samples to download and use for inspiration.
Lifetime access to lessons about Message, Design, and Delivery.
Case studies from your colleagues on analyzing grantmaking data, building dashboards, and adding accessible graphs to slideshows.
Guest speakers who specialize in PowerPoint, public speaking, and more.
Office Hours sessions throughout 2026. <-- I don't talk about these nearly enough.
Additional support and materials, like an 80-page ebook with checklists and case studies; private Data Vizards community of fellow participants; captions on all videos; and certificates of completion.
And when you register by March 14, 2026, you'll also get:
Swag Bags with t-shirts, stickers, and pins.
A 45-minute 1:1 consultation after you finish 25% of the course lessons.
Another 45-minute 1:1 consultation after you finish 50% of the course lessons.
Course Creation, a half-day course about designing, recording, and marketing your own online course.
Make Slide Templates, a half-day course about using the Slide Master to create branded, accessible PowerPoint templates for your company.
Okay, enough about Powerful Presentations! Here are some additional data management and data visualization resources for you.
File Naming Tips
I posted a practical tip on LinkedIn this morning: ✖️ DON'T "save" the same file over and over and over. All programs crash, especially Excel. All files get corrupted sometimes, especially Excel. Saving the same file over and over = more likely to lose your work. ✔️ Instead, "SAVE AS" a new file each work session. I put the dates in the file name, not "v1" or "v2" or "final-final." I use YYYY-MM-DD format so they line up chronologically, not "Jan, Feb, Mar" or "3-2026" accidentally preceding "4-2025." I also write brief notes to myself about the focus of that work session (in case I mess something up and need to go back to a previous version). A coworker taught me the "SAVE AS" technique almost 20 years ago, and when my files get corrupted and garbled and lost entirely, I'm so grateful - because I've only lost a single work session of time, not the entire project.
There are some great comments from the Excel MVP community on LinkedIn - lots of nuances to consider!
Gorgeous DataViz Examples
Here are some of my recent favorites:
Using dots to add some punch to your data, from Charlotte Eckstein. (And here's one of my blog posts with a how-to tutorial for using dots and icons for "small n" dataviz scenarios.)
March 14: Early bird registration ends forPowerful Presentations. That's the deadline to take advantage of the Swag Bags, 1:1 consultations, and the extra Course Creation training.
May 3-5: The Eastern Evaluation Research Society's annual conference takes place in Seaview, New Jersey. Years ago, I worked part-time to help organize this conference. It's such a special group of people.
May 5-7: Tableau's annual conference takes place in San Diego, California.
May 19-20: As a keynote speaker for the Global Excel Summit in London, I get one free guest pass to the event. What are you doing May 19-20 in London?? Want the guest pass?? Reply and let me know. So far, about a dozen people are interested, so we'll create a raffle or giveaway of some sort.
June 24-25: The Data Visualization Society's Outlier conference takes place online.
A trusted data visualization leader for more than 10 years. On-site workshops for 25,000 researchers, evaluators, and scientists in 31 states and 11 countries. Online courses for 10,000 participants. 200 consulting clients. 5 kids. My first HYROX in Miami is this weekend! Yikes!!
