I suck at PowerPoint
I’m a first year analyst and I’m very good with modeling part of the job and everything else, however I’m struggling with one of the most important parts. Creating cims and presentations is something I obviously didn’t prepare for as much while trying to get into banking but I’ve come to find out it’s one of more difficult parts of the job. I’m very slow at moving around on PowerPoint, not very familiar with the charts and designing part of it, and struggle with finding ways to generate ways to get talk about the company with out stealing their words in a timely manner. So if anyone has an suggestions on how to get quicker on those things like a course or YouTube channel, I’d greatly appreciate it.
Your firm's internal drive literally hundreds of previous decks you can reference for any type of presentation...dig through them in your free time and save examples of each type to a "personal learning folder" on your computer. Have a sub folder for each type of deck, ie CIM, management presentation, etc. No need to reinvent the wheel here, pretty simple shit.
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Factset shape tools on your shortcut bar. It’s a tie between that and align that I use most. Its like getting better in excel, don’t use your mouse.
Not using your mouse in ppt is awful advice. Its incredibly inefficient to hit tab a shit ton of times instead of just clicking the shape
Quick access toolbar is pretty useful and efficient IMO
Brain dead take, you select it with your mouse and then use the fact set tool bar. Way more efficient than clicking and dragging
What is it with people and this weird, snobby attitude towards people who use their mouse? It gets the job done and doesn't take that much longer... If anything, sitting around learning shortcuts and whatnot takes ages when you can just click to where you need to go. It's not an either or, either, you can use both.
had similar issues when my decks had to engage the audience.
1) I noticed that I create better presentations on keynote rather than PP. I can't use Keynote at work because we are all on windows. But I noticed it - everything just looked better with it.
2) When I don't have a clue where to start, I take a blank sheet of paper and draw a "story line" on it.
- what is the point I am trying to make?
- what are the key elements and how much time/effort should they have in the presentation?
- compare with other presentations already on our shared drives
^ this is what I was going to say.
I've found that keynote offers a lot more creative legroom than powerpoint -in a larger institution that uses a set system it can be hard to deviate away from that but it's a great way to use it as a virtual workbook, I'm lucky that I can use keynote (it's a dream!). I don't know any Youtube videos that show ppt tips etc. but I'm sure a search will yield some results.
It is very easy to think that you need to to everything on your desktop. One thing I have always done is to have a notepad I carry with me for meetings to take notes and sketch out ideas and then I have an A3 black paper pad for sketching out ideas and brainstorming/problem solving. I don't quite know why it works so well but using your hands to sketch out your thought process is a really great way of stretching your creative muscles. I would try and cover three main boxes when you're drafting an idea for a deck: What is the problem; why it's worth solving; how I can solve it better than the rest.
+1 for using previous decks for your own inspiration too.
I’ll literally rip slides from online: eg look up “competitive advantage slides” on google and copy the layout. Always got good reviews when doing this lol.
Or u can use smart art, then what I like to do is ungroup the smart art (always thought that working with the smart art itself wasn’t super intuitive) and play around with it
Lately, I’ve been also feeding chat GPT with some un structured thoughts and telling it to summarize my thoughts and make it sound more Wall Street like lol, always seems to do a well enough job of at least not making me sound like an idiot
The WSP PowerPoint course w/ their provided QAT helped me absolutely rip slides and set up shells easily. Now the hardest part is CIM writing, but I guess that comes with time…
Definitely comes with time. As a junior analyst the goal should be to have something on the page the associate / VP can later tweak. It's much easier for them to rewrite something than to write it from scratch. If you are a coverage banker, I suggest reading equity and industry research as it all help you write more intelligently about the company.
Hell yes, I’ve never gotten any advice for CIM writing but the ER reports sound like an amazing idea. I have no problem putting the right context in each line for some investment considerations or whatever else, but I always see particular wording switched around when my analyst / associate flips a turn. I always ask them rationale behind it being changed but it’s always along the lines of “Just the way ‘MD’ wants to see it” with no further explanation.
It's just about the reps. PPT is harder to prep for than excel modeling. Leverage the absolute shit out of the firm precedent materials which were delivered to clients... if they were quality enough then, they will be now.
I bought the BIWS PPT course ($200 I think) when I first started in banking and it saved my ass, spent an entire weekend running through it and it was worth every penny for me. As another post mentioned, one of the best things you can do is use formats from other decks, no point in reinventing the wheel every time you build a CIM or pitch deck. Building a CIM is probably one of the most mind numbing parts of banking and just about every Analyst has been where you are, getting comfortable with PPT and generating material just takes reps and consistent use same as anything else.
Invest in a PowerPoint course. You'll spend 90% of your time in ppt. BIWS is a good one. Believe this site offers one as well.
That is correct! WSO PowerPoint Course
I think that PowerPoint itself is very easy to use but I have no imagination whatsoever, so coming up with ideas on how to design slides from scratch takes me ages...
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