The Agenda builder is one of the most powerful features in Power-user. This tool helps you work your storytelling and automatically structure your presentation with table of content pages that can be easily updated.
Video tutorial for creating Agenda pages automatically in PowerPoint using Power-user
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Benefits of using the Agenda
The importance of having an agenda to structure a presentation
Any good business presentation needs to be properly structured. Organizing a presentation is as important as its content, because a presentation is a demonstration. People need to follow the logic of the presentation to be convinced and adhere to the demonstration. A presentation's structure can be built using the Minto Pyramid Principle, a very famous methodology developped for McKinsey strategy consultants.
Agenda pages are a key part of this presentation structure. They give an overview of the content of the presentation and how it's organized. A table of content usually lists all indexed sections in the presentation with the corresponding page number.
Very often, these pages are repeated at the beginning of each section in the presentation, with a highlight on the next section. This helps people understand which section have been seen already, what comes next, and how it is part of the bigger demonstration.
Creating agenda pages manually is a highly time-consuming process
In Microsoft Word, users can generate table of contents automatically. But unfortunately, Microsoft PowerPoint doesn't come with an equivalent feature.
So a typical PowerPoint user will have to create agenda pages manually. This means designing a slide listing section numbers, section names, page numbers, etc. Then this page is usually duplicated for each section of the presentation, and each of these pages is modified to show a highlight on the next section it is introducing.
Not only can it be quite long to design and add highlights to all these pages, but it is also very long to update them. If a new section is added, all the existing shapes on the slide will need to be moved, aligned and distributed again. The section numbers and page numbers will also change. And these changes will need to be again replicated on all the agenda pages in the entire presentation. So if you have 10 sections already, it means you will have to replicate all your changes 10x, something that can a huge amount of time.
About the Power-user Agenda
With Power-user, you can create, design and update agenda pages automatically in your entire presentation:
- Simply list your sections once,
- Easily edit section names and slide titles to build a compelling storyline for your audience,
- Select your preferred visual style, switch between using a table of content or a divider format, and easily customize the agenda pages with your colors, numbering style, etc,
- Whenever there are changes to your structure, update all the agenda pages at once with just 1 click!
This feature can save you 20 min every time you have to update the agenda for your presentation, while ensuring it's always up to date and error-free.
How to create an Agenda with Power-user
Opening the Agenda
From the Power-user tab, click the Agenda button located at the center of the ribbon, under the Format menu.
Once you have clicked Agenda, Power-user will open the below task pane at the right of your screen, like shown below:
Creating the Agenda structure
From the Agenda task pane shown above, you can create the presentation for your agenda. The pane lists all your sections and slide titles, and lets you structure them:
- Click the green "+" sign to add a new section.
- Click a section name in the list to rename it or use the Rename button from the menu on the top.
- Increase or decrease indent to to have sections and sub-sections.
- Move your slides and sections up or down with the up/down arrows.
We recommend using this pane for working on your storytelling first. You can make sure that your section names are consistent with your slide titles, and that the all presentation will unfold in a natural and compelling way to convince your audience.
Once you are happy with your presentation structure, click Update at the bottom of the pane. Power-user will create any missing agenda page in the presentation, and update all existing pages.
Customizing the Agenda design
Design options
Click the Design tab of the Agenda pane to access the options for customizing the Agenda design:
From here you can:
- Switch between using a Table of content format at the beginning of each section, or just Dividers.
- Customize the style of these Tables of content or Dividers (see below).
- Add or remove a Cover page at the beginning of the presentation, which is an additional table of content slide, without any highlight.
- Add or remove slide numbers on your agenda pages.
- Add or remove section numbers on your agenda pages.
- Customize the style of the section numbers, for instance 1) 2) 3), or I, II, III, or A, B, C. You can edit the style for each level of section.
- Customize the title of the agenda pages. It can show an identical text on all agenda pages (for instance, "Agenda"), or show the name of each section.
- Customize the color used for the agenda.
Once you have made your changes, click Update to apply them in the presentation.
Selecting a style for a Table of content
You can customize how your Table of content agenda pages should look, in order to match your brand as much as possible.
From the Design tab, next to Table of content, click the Style button. The following window will show the different styles available:
Click the style of your choice, or use the star in the top-right corner to make it your favorite permanently (and the default style in the future).
Click Update to apply the new style to the presentation automatically.
Power-user currently supports only the 4 styles shown above. Each style requires a specific algorithm to define the relative position of each object, depending on the number of sections. This is why it's not possible to completely customize where each object on the slide should be without writing a dedicated algorithm.
We are working on a future version of the Agenda that will enable further options for customizing this further.Selecting a style for Dividers
If you are opting for Dividers instead of repeating the entire table of content on each agenda page, you can also customize how these Dividers should look.
From the Design tab, next to Dividers, click the Style button. The following window will show the different styles available:
Click the style of your choice, or use the star in the top-right corner to make it your favorite permanently (and the default style in the future).
Click Update to apply the new style to the presentation automatically.
Customizing the layout for Agenda pages
Aside from the overall appearance of the agenda page itself, you can customize the layout that should be applied. For instance, changing the layout will allow you to decide where your company logo should be displayed, what the format of the titles should be, etc.
To customize the layout, prepare the layout of your choice in the Master View. Then right-click a slide, and choose Set as Agenda layout or Set as Divider layout.
This will tell Power-user to always use this layout for when you create or update agenda pages.
- For Table of content, the layout is basically a slide with the background of the agenda slide, the title position and format, and the logos, footer, page number etc. you would like applied.
- For Dividers, because there is no algorithm needed (since the slide will always contains just 1 section), you can further customize the layout. When you have created an agenda with Dividers, a default layout will automatically be added to your Slide Master (in the Master View). You can position and format the the <N> placeholder (for the section number) and <SectionName> placeholder (for the section name).
We recommend admins to choose a corporate layout, and click Set as Agenda layout in their corporate master before releasing the master to all their users.
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