With Power-user you can build a winning strategy for your business proposals by configuring powerful features such as Tombstones to give users the ability to showcase highly relevant, up-to-date and perfectly formatted realizations of your company. 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• About Tombstones
  • What are Tombstones? 
  • How do Tombstones work in Power-user?
• How to use Tombstones
  • Browsing for Tombstones
  • Selecting the layout to apply in PowerPoint
  • Inserting Tombstones
• Setting up Tombstones

About Tombstones

What are Tombstones? 

Tombstones, also called credentials or references, are something many companies use in their PowerPoint proposals to show similar deals / projects that they have successfully delivered in the past. They serve as a compelling argument that the company has experience in delivering projects similar to the one they are trying to sell with their proposal.  

Tombstones are mostly used, but not exclusively, by companies in consulting, finance or marketing services.

An example of Tombstones used for showing credentials in the banking sector

How do Tombstones work in Power-user?

In most companies, credentials are manually managed and compiled. This causes many inefficiencies and can waste users a huge amount of time:

• Users will manually spend time looking into old proposals to find Tombstones that they can reuse.
• Because this is a time-consuming process, they will take what they find and maybe not the most relevant credentials to actually win the proposal they are currently working on.
• Additional time will be spent formatting Tombstones so that they all match the PowerPoint layout of the current proposal.
• Very often, they will need to translate these references to the language of the current proposal, and maybe even translate them back next time because they have no way to know where to find the version in the language they need.

The Power-user Tombstones feature will make life easier for users preparing proposals in PowerPoint, and boost their productivity: 

• Instead of manually exploring previous proposals for credentials, they will be able to browse all references of their organization directly from the Power-user Library in PowerPoint.
• They will be able to apply filters on various fields like dates, industry, language etc. to immediately find the most relevant Tombstones for the proposal they are currently working on.
• They will not need to do any manual formatting, as the chose corporate layout(s) for Tombstones will be automatically applied. 

At the end of the day, the Tombstones feature will give companies using Power-user a decisive competitive advantage to win business proposals and expand their business efficiently.

How to use Tombstones

Browsing for Tombstones

• From the Power-user tab, open the Library and go to Tombstones. The first time or after every update, it may take a moment as the Tombstones are getting downloaded.
• Use the searchbar to look for Tombstones matching specific keywords, like a client name for instance.
• Open the Filters pane for performing finer searches, for instance filtering Tombstones matching a specific industry, period of time and language:

Applying custom filters will provide users with the most relevant credentials to win a proposal

• You can sort Tombstones how you see fit. Click the Sort icon from the pane, select the field to use for sorting, and the order (ascending or descending):

Customizing the Sort order for Tombstones

Selecting the layout to apply in PowerPoint

Because Tombstones are created dynamically and automatically formatted, they can be inserted in multiple PowerPoint layouts. 

• Click the Layout icon from the pane to see the custom layouts that have been set up by your organization.
• Click the preferred layout to apply it, and close the Layout view. The previews will automatically adjust to the chosen layout. Below are a few examples of layouts:

A classic layout with only a short description of the project

A pure logo layout for creating logo slides automatically

A case study layout with a longer description of the project

Inserting Tombstones

Once you have applied the proper filters and chosen a layout, you can select the Tombstone(s) to insert:

• If Multi-selection is OFF, just click a Tombstones and it will immediately be inserted on your slide with the chosen layout.
• If Multi-selection is ON, click a Tombstones to add it to the selection. Select each Tombstones that you want like this, and when you are ready, click Insert selected tombstones at the bottom of the pane. All the Tombstones will then be inserted at once.

Facing problems with the Library? Here are the 2 most frequent issues:
The templates / icons / maps are not downloading in the Library
The mouse cursor is flickering in the right pane

Setting up Tombstones

Tombstones need to be enabled by your Power-user admin. If this feature hasn't been set up, Power-user will only show sample data.

Tombstones can be fully customized to fit your own organization's template and data. 

For more information on how to set up Tombstones, read this article: Configuring Tombstones for your organization