Modern corporate life is now periodically punctuated with meetings having as a centerpiece a computer generated presentation utilizing presentation graphics programs, such as PowerPoint® by Microsoft®, Presentations® by Corel®, and others. The subject of the presentations is unlimited, spanning almost every aspect of professional business activity, from simple sales pitches to sophisticated analysis of potential take-over candidates. The common theme to these presentations is the need for eye-catching graphics and text, dispersed with the core—but sometimes less appealing—data.
The modem retail presentation software package has evolved to a highly functional, incredibly powerful and versatile presentation slide creator, with hundreds of possible variations for presentation styles. Indeed, the level of operating sophistication of the packages renders them almost unusable without dozens if not hundreds of hours of practice or training. While these retail products often include a separate package of style templates to ease and simplify operation, navigation through these templates themselves is an incredibly tricky process.
For larger entities, such as corporations, and other institutions, there is a hidden risk associated with widespread use of these presentation packages. It is important to note that these presentations are for transferring information, some of it sensitive, and the rest typically impacting the overall impression of the institution in the eye of the presentation audiences. Clearly, corporations and others are concerned with content and wish to present a common, structured impression whenever representatives are active in presentations on behalf of the institution. This issue is particularly acute for presentation packages, known as “pitch books” used to promote a corporate service offering. These pitch books are often provided with details and may last significantly past the initial presentation. Thus, it is critical that the appearance remain and provide a powerful and positive theme.
And finally, the actual content that is imported to the presentation is itself found in a myriad of legacy data types—spreadsheets, databases, information from data vendors, etc. This data is not uniformly stored and often, very dynamic, such as security price data and corporate valuations.
For large corporations, the above issues are typically addressed by devoting a dedicated staff of well trained presentation creators, available to the sales and management teams, to assist in custom building of individual presentations for select occasions. These individuals are highly skilled in the graphics capabilities of the retail presentation software and, more importantly, can impart a common “look and feel” to each disparate presentation that is a positive reflection on the corporation.
Of course, there are problems with this arrangement, beyond the mere expense of a dedicated staff. For one, these individuals often lack the intimate details of the presentation and its underlying purpose. Moreover, the creation timeline is often extended as the presentation becomes an iterative process, interrupting and/or delayed by intervening events. This often prevents use of these talented creators for the smaller, less critical presentations, which are thereafter left to the individual presenters to fight through the layers of programming to complete their slides. This is an important problem as these smaller presentations far outnumber the big ones, and, in sum, may impact external perceptions in a greater way.
It was the recognition of the above problems by the inventors that has led to the development of the presentation enhancement system disclosed and described in detail infra.