Consulting PowerPoint Toolbar: The Complete Guide

We created PPT Productivity Toolbars to make our lives easier.  As consultants, we wanted time saving PowerPoint shortcuts to make it faster to create and to 'polish' slides.  Ease of reuse was critical. Consultants do a lot of reuse - we dreamed of a 'turbo charged clipboard' in PowerPoint (skip ahead to read about our Slide Library feature if this is also something you have wished for!).

PPT Productivity is the best PowerPoint Add-in for Consultants. If you're not a consultant it might surprise you to learn consultants spend a lot of their time editing PowerPoint to fine tune and polish the slides.  A LOT of time. Consultants are PowerPoint power users.

Many of the consulting firms have proprietary PowerPoint add-ins - e.g. Accenture QPT Tools, Bain Toolbox for PowerPoint, McKinsey's Marvin Tools for PowerPoint, EY SlideFox, Deloitte Ribbon, PwC Smart add-in, Strategy& Toolbar, Oliver Wyman's OW tools for PowerPoint are all examples. Other firms build up decks of slides for reuse if they don't have a PowerPoint Slide Library capability (The Deloitte Timesaver PowerPoint is one we've heard a lot about from our Deloitte alumni customers). Different firms use different terminology - some refer to them as PowerPoint plugins or PowerPoint addons, but they are just different labels for the same thing: time saving PowerPoint tools for consultants.

PPT Productivity's team came out of management consulting firms (Boston Consulting Group / BCG and Accenture alumni), where PowerPoint presentations are often the primary deliverable for a client.  We invited our McKinsey and Bain alumni friends and colleagues to share their feedback on the features they missed the most.

So the PPT Productivity Consulting PowerPoint add-in was created by consultants, for consultants and strategy teams. Our aim was to build the best Consulting PowerPoint add-in. But our customer base has grown over time - in addition to consultants, PPT Productivity customers include strategy professionals, sales and marketing teams, finance teams, analytics teams, researchers, teachers and more.

If you're a power user of PowerPoint and want to save time, PPT Productivity add-in is for you.

PPT Productivity offers a free 30 day trial with access to all features. The licensing model is flexible with no multi year contracts. Licenses can be purchased for 1, 2 or 3 year periods for a single user, a team or an entire organization.  You can easily add license seats to your key if your team is growing, with pro-rata additions available and volume discounts. Or smaller teams can let team members all purchase individually. Empower your team with the right PowerPoint add-in to save time and boost the polish of their slides.

PPT Productivity PowerPoint add-in has 200+ time saving features. We think all the features are amazing (obviously!), but here are our favorites:

• The Slide Library for PowerPoint - save, name and easily search to reuse shapes or entire PowerPoint slides. The Slide Library is our 'turbo charged clipboard' - a toolbar that displays the slides and shapes you save or download. The slides and shapes are saved in Libraries (kind of library folders) - you can have your own personal library (one or multiple) as well as libraries that are shared across a team.
• Access an existing repository of slides, shapes, frameworks and icons via the downloadable libraries. PPT Productivity has a repository of objects available for you to download and use via your Slide Library Toolbar. The repository includes 2000+ shapes, frameworks, maps, flags and more AND ~1000 icons you can recolor and resize. The Downloadable libraries are included in PPT Productivity Power Tools licenses (even when you are on the free trial).
• Slide Builder Toolbar - its easier than ever to create consulting style slide layouts with PPT Productivity's Slide Builder Toolbar. Customizable guides let you setup visual columns and rows on your slide for auto alignment. Textboxes, headings and other elements can 'snap' to the guides when added to your slide. Plus you can save preset elements in your preferred format for quick access when building slides. E.g. customize your line weights, table formats, footnote positions and more and access them in a click from the Slide Builder Toolbar.
• Table formatting - paste Excel data into PowerPoint, but retain your preferred PowerPoint table format! Auto-size tables to optimize for column width. Group shapes to convert to table format or deconstruct a table into separate textboxes. If you need to paste data from Excel into a PowerPoint table, PPT Productivity will automatically extend the columns and rows in PowerPoint to match the pasted data.
• Customizable shortcut keys - We've turbocharged the number of shortcut keys available in PowerPoint! PPT Productivity Power Tools comes with an extra 70 preset shortcuts and you can set up additional shortcuts based on personal preference or to recreate shortcut keys from your previous firm. (Note that for McKinsey Alums and Bain alums, we've already created preset mappings for your shortcuts!).
• Sticky notes - reviewers can tag slides with feedback or use them to keep track of your own list of 'to-do's. PowerPoint comments are easier with stickies! Choose from four note colors to differentiate or customize and choose your own colors. Plus you can easily clear all comments / notes before finalizing the presentation in a single click (sidenote for Bain alums - we've included the specific Bain type stickies as an extra option in the Slide Builder toolbar).
• Agenda Wizard - generate PowerPoint Agenda, Table of Contents and divider slides that dynamically update as you move content around. Using PPT Productivity's Agenda Wizard you can create a new PowerPoint agenda from scratch, paste from clipboard or quickly convert your tag lines or a summary slide to create the agenda items. Need to rearrange your slides? No problem, the Agenda updates dynamically (click to sync). Choose to use PowerPoint sections or not = the Agenda Wizard works either way!
• Proofing Tools - Lots of features to help do a final check of your deck before sending it off. Features include a PowerPoint font fix (specify a font for your PowerPoint presentation and fix your deck), file size reducer, fix punctuation (incl period or no period for all bullet points), specify outlines/ borders and more.

PPT Productivity's friendly team is based in Australia and North America and we support all time zones. We are very responsive via email and you can book in a walkthrough and have a chat to one of our friendly team. Download the free 30 day trial today and check out the features of PPT Productivity - the best PowerPoint Add-in for Strategy Professionals.