New SmartArt layouts, including numbered lists and Meet the Team options

August 20, 2026 by Ellen Finkelstein Leave a Comment

SmartArt has been around a long time with no significant changes, but finally, we have some new SmartArt layouts!

First of all, let me say that I’m a big fan of SmartArt. It’s a way to turn a boring-looking bulleted list into something that looks like a graphic. SmartArt will make your slide more easily digestible for your audience.

It’s a great option for non-designers.

I have an old post, My Favorite SmartArt faves, that will give you some ideas, if you haven’t been using SmartArt.

Numbered SmartArt lists!

I’ve been wanting numbered SmartArt for a long time. Yes, I created a workaround but it was a bit time-consuming. It was 6 steps!

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Creating beautiful process diagrams with a teardrop shape

February 28, 2025 by Ellen Finkelstein Leave a Comment

Process diagrams are very useful for depicting (obviously) processes. Processes are a common topic in presentations and describing them with just words doesn’t work very well.

In this post, I’ll explain 2 ways to create a process diagram:

Using SmartArt
Creating it from scratch, to give you more variations and possibilities.

Let’s start with this slide, “4 pieces to the online marketing puzzle.” The 4 pieces are website, email, products, and events. But because I’m suggesting that this is a process, that is, you start by creating a website, then build an email list, and so on, it’s a process. You do one after the other.

A quick way would be to turn it into SmartArt, following these steps:

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A simple, 4-step guide to beautifully visualize data in your presentations

October 29, 2017 by Ellen Finkelstein 3 Comments

This is a guest post by Yousef “Yoyo” Abu Ghaidah, a PowerPoint ninja who founded Slide Cow, a learning platform for all things PowerPoint, presentations and public speaking. When he’s not designing slides or giving presentations, he’s on another coffee run. You can follow him on Twitter here.

You probably already know that adding illustrations to your presentation content is a great way to communicate your message in a way that is fast, easy and effective. This especially makes sense when data comes into play. After all, data is just a bunch of facts or statistics that are collected together for reference and analysis. So, if you’re designing slides, it’s imperative you find a way to communicate data that makes it easy for your audience to process.

Think about it, would you interpret a table full of meaningless numbers, or a chart that illustrates those numbers in a way that allows you to spot critical patterns and trends instead? I don’t know about you, but I value my time. I don’t want to look at a slide and play Where’s Waldo^TM for five minutes when I already know there’s a better way. [Read more…]

Changing the order of items in a chart

January 31, 2017 by Ellen Finkelstein 3 Comments

Have you ever seen this when you created a chart in PowerPoint? Look at the order of the items in the datasheet and in the bar chart itself.

They’re the opposite of each other! If you care about the order of the data in your chart, this can be very frustrating!

Fortunately, there are 2 for changing the order of items in a chart.

1. Reverse the order in the Format Axis pane

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Integrating Live Power BI Dashboards into PowerPoint

April 25, 2016 by Ellen Finkelstein 5 Comments

Introduction

At SlideModel.com we create professional PowerPoint Templates to help our subscribers save time creating professional presentation decks. An important segment of our customers is interested in presenting business data and require professional visualizations for this task. Dashboard templates include several charts, cards and visual representations of data in a way that is easy present. Our Dashboard templates are created with usability in mind, and they comply with design best practices. They are data driven, this means that the visualizations are created through Excel charts, allowing the user to use live data for those visualizations. Even more, if the user connects Microsoft Excel to external data sources (as a database or other files) the user can refresh the charts with you information dynamically. Having said that, create the report once and use it always.

Power BI

In the last months, SlideModel.com has been receiving requests from their dashboard users in order to integrate their templates with the new tool of Self Service Business Intelligence from Microsoft, called Power BI. This new tool and service from Microsoft provides end users the ability to create local data stores, analyze the data, create stunning visualizations, and publish them into the web for sharing. The Power BI service has a free version, and the analysis tool (Power BI desktop) is also free to download. The tool is gaining tremendous traction and several corporations are adopting it as their self service BI option.

The main benefits of using Power BI for your presentation dashboards is:

Power BI is connected to live data. Build your reports and dashboard once, refresh and be able to show updated data.
Power BI provides new visualizations not available in Office 365 and is powered by a growing developers community that posts new visualizations regularly.
Power BI is a self service BI tool, harnessing the power of Power Query and DAX and making available already summarized visualizations.

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