Nancy Duarte’s firm Duarte Design just launched an online market place for PowerPoint diagram templates: Diagrammer. You can select from a library of 4,000 diagrams that are ready to be included and edited into your own PowerPoint presentation. Each file costs $0.99.



I always found one of the best parts of Nancy’s first book Slide:ology (review of the book) to be the collection of diagram concepts. Now this collection has been digitized and automated.

There is one competitor to Diagrammer built right into PowerPoint, the smart objects. But somehow, smart objects never worked for me, they are awkward to edit and to fit into the look and feel of the overall presentation. Moreover, Diagrammer has a much more powerful classification method, helping you to zoom into the exact diagram you need (flow, 2D, 4 steps).

Diagrammer also competes with other template sites such as Slideshop. Slideshop has more elaborate graphics (not always a good thing) and a broader variety of slide types.

Diagrammer fills a clear need for diagrams in everyday, corporate, strategy-type presentations. One of the easiest ways to replace a bullet point chart is to shorten the bullets and put them each in boxes with a framework that shows the relationships between the elements. (Still, it might be hard to resist for many users to shrink the font sizes in each of the boxes and cram in some more text...)

Congratulations to Duarte with the launch of Diagrammer, it shows that they have an open mind to innovate presentation design. It is impossible for bespoke presentation design (like the service I provide) to free the world of poor presentations. Self-service technology might get us there eventually.

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