Timeline Template For Mac Powerpoint

Timeline SmartArt diagram slide (white on dark gray, widescreen) PowerPoint Timeline slide (blue horizontal chevrons, widescreen) PowerPoint Project planning timeline Word.

How do you quickly turn your Excel data into visual PowerPoint layouts in minutes, rather than hours? There are two super fast ways to do this: The first technique we’ll cover is an insanely clever PowerPoint hack (that few know about), and the second is an awesome add-in you can get to do all of the heavy lifting for you.

They both adhere to the Golden Rule of Speed Training: Never Do Anything Manually That PowerPoint Will Automatically Do For You Whereas most people would insert shapes and copy/paste and/or retype their text, moving from Excel to PowerPoint, we’re going to focus on getting PowerPoint to do the heavy lifting for you, because The less manual-mumbo-jumbo you have to do to build your graphic, the more you can get done! For this PowerPoint tutorial, I’ll focus 100% on creating Gantt Charts or timelines, but the same rules and hacks apply to any other Excel data you might have, BUT Let’s first get this out of the way. Yesyour Gantt Chart data is easy to type up and hold in Excel (what I call listy-Excel). And the two main obstacles you need to overcome when moving form listy-Excel to visual-PowerPoint are: Obstacle #1: Getting started without going crazy Getting your Excel information in PowerPoint shapes that you can then fully manipulate is a no-starter for most people BUT it doesn’t have to be!

What can take most people 10, 20 or even 60 minutes to pull off, I’ll show you how to do in just a few minutes. Obstacle #2: Updating the data after the fact This is the classic Excel to PowerPoint challenge. How do you quickly update your information without spending hours re-manipulating your objects or having to start all over again?

That’s where these two clever techniques come into play The first is an insanely clever PowerPoint hack (that few know about); and the second is an add-in you can get to do all of the heavy lifting for you. And even though you will fall in love with the add-in (covered below), the first hack is something EVERY PowerPoint Ninja should know, so don’t skip ahead just yet.

There are 3 major downsides to this technique: Downside #1: Manually arranging and formatting your objects Although the SmartArt Ninja trick for turning your Excel data into PowerPoint objects is awesome, you still need to manually update, format and align your objects. How long it takes you depends on how much speed training you’ve had. Downside #2: The timeline is not 100% exact Let’s face it, if you are manually moving things around in PowerPoint for a timeline, things will not be 100% exact. In the graphic above, I guesstimated where the dates start and stopI didn’t not figure out the exact place where Sept-8 should line up with the Sept rectangle, for example. In this case I think it’s fine, but if you want 100% precision, you want the add-in I’m about to show you next. Downside #3: Updating the Gantt chart As the graphic is manually built by you, updating your Gantt Chart requires you to do it manually. There is no way to dynamically link the Gantt Chart up with your Excel spreadsheet.

On the flip side, there is an add-in that will do ALL of this heavy lifting for you. Now let’s look at the big guns for building Gantt Charts quickly – the Office Timeline+ add-in. If you build lots of project charts and timelines like this, you simply need to get the Office Timeline+ add-in which does ALL of the heavy lifting for you including: • Building the entire graphic for you • Allowing you to quickly change elements within the graphic • Allowing you to quickly update the data sets • Building the time sequence for you and keeping it all exact (and I mean PERFECTLY exact) Visual learners can watch the video below, otherwise skip the video and read on. Before we get to formatting the graphic, let’s look at what we have accomplished. Instead of manually adding shapes to your PowerPoint slide and copying/pasting or retyping your text, which violates our Golden Rule of Speed Training: Never Do Anything Manually That PowerPoint Can Automatically Do For You Instead we looked at: • How to turn your Excel data into PowerPoint shapes using and breaking SmartArt graphics.