About
Bookshelf
Does all that knowledge just appear out of nowhere? Of course not. The templates and add-ins I build are the result of years of experience, but also of quite a bit of reading. This page lists a selection of books and online resources that have helped me along the way.
PowerPoint
Building PowerPoint Templates
Echo Swinford and Julie Terberg
The standard work when it comes to building solid templates. Echo and Julie are big names in the PowerPoint world. Every page holds valuable information.
Microsoft PowerPoint Best Practices, Tips and Techniques
Chantal Bossé
A good book on the technical side, as a complement to Building PowerPoint Templates. But if you have to choose, I'd go for the latter.
Microsoft PowerPoint Mastery
Chantal Bossé
I found this book by Chantal very valuable. Not just the technical side of PowerPoint, but also chapters like 'Analyzing your audience and presentation delivery needs', 'Practicing your presentation delivery', and 'PowerPoint Live and Interactive Features in Microsoft Teams'. A welcome addition.
The Reluctant Designer's Field Guide to PowerPoint
Stephy Hogan
A different angle. I knew her S.C.H.I.T. Deck and was curious. This little book is a nice addition to the shelf, but I wouldn't recommend it as a first choice in this category.
Presentation Pitfalls
John Polk
10 traps business professionals fall into and how to avoid them
A truly packed book with very usable information. Luckily every chapter ends with a 'key takeaways' page, because there's simply too much valuable information in it to remember without those checklists.
Made You Look
Carmen Simon
A book about making PowerPoint presentations by a neuroscientist — with a lot of scientific backing for why things do or don't work. It's also packed with beautiful slide designs, so it's a good source of inspiration too. The price is surprisingly low for how beautiful and valuable the book is.
Storyteller Tactics
Not a book, but a box of cards that help you give your presentation structure. '50+ frameworks used daily by marketers, managers, educators and execs in 100+ industries worldwide.'
Typography and layout
The Complete Manual of Typography
James Felici
A guide to setting perfect type
A great resource for learning about every facet of typography. I still use this book sometimes when there's no design agency involved — to try to let go of the idea of justified text in Word, or to make the case that the ratio between font size and line length isn't good for readability. As far as I know, it's only available secondhand.
Data visualization
How Charts Lie
Alberto Cairo
A great resource for learning to build better data visualizations — and to understand and evaluate other people's work.
Julie Terberg
August 2024
A great free resource for choosing fonts. Don't let the title fool you: this applies just as much to Word. Covers factors to consider, font sources with pros and cons, licensing, embedding, and variable fonts. Tip: font embedding is currently not supported by Excel. And if you choose Google Fonts, use the 'static fonts' for Office — variable fonts cause problems when creating a PDF.
Julie Terberg
Don't just look at Google Fonts — also consider Microsoft Cloud Fonts, which are installed dynamically.
Data Visualization in Excel
Jonathan Schwabish
A very accessible book for learning to build all kinds of charts in Excel — which you can then use in Word and PowerPoint — that aren't available by default.
Better Data Visualizations
Jonathan Schwabish
From the same author. Not specifically focused on Excel, but goes deeper into data visualization in general.
Better Presentations
Jonathan Schwabish
A somewhat thinner book from Jonathan at the intersection of data visualization and PowerPoint. Nice as an introduction, but more superficial than his other work.
Effective Data Visualization
Stephanie D.H. Evergreen
'The right chart for the right data.'
Substantial overlap in content with Jonathan Schwabish's books. A mix of data visualization in general and instructions on how to build it in Excel, with 'ninja levels' to indicate difficulty.
Accessible documents
The S.C.H.I.T. Deck
Stephy Hogan
Meeting WCAG guidelines for accessible documents isn't easy — technically not even when you use Office, and certainly not when you try to make sense of the official guidelines. This book offers an accessible explanation and a clear structure: Sight / Cognition / Hearing / Interaction / Technology. Every 'card' comes with a guideline number, guideline level, and 'digital things the guideline applies to'.
Word
Huh? No books about Word? No, oddly enough I don't have any. That all turned out to be learned through trial and error. There are some old, technical books — about ribbon customization, for example — but nothing worth mentioning on this page.
Other
How to do great work without being an asshole
Paul Woods
'It's long been an accepted, almost celebrated, fact of the creative industries that long hours, chaotic workflows, and egotistical colleagues are just the price you pay to produce great work. In fact, this toxic culture is the enemy of creativity.' Sounds heavy, but the tone of the book is different: 'A straight-talking, fun read for all creatives.' Packed with anecdotes, self-analysis flowcharts, exercises and action plans for better working practices.