David Benaim talks about new features of Excel, Powerpoint and Sway in three engaging presentations during the MGI Worldwide CPAAI Virtual Global Meeting
During last week's Virtual Global Meeting our resident #tech expert David Benaim hosted three breakout sessions looking at some of the exciting new features of Excel, Powerpoint and Sway.
AI & Modern charts in Excel
David's first session, entitled AI & Modern charts in Excel, covered the following topics (click the links to see Youtube tutorials on each subject):
- AI Ideas: Scan a table for insights into outliers, trends, frequency, correlation without writing a single formula.
- Ask a question: Highlight a table and then ask things like “Top 3 customers in 2019 in UK” or “Median sales in August” etc.
- Waterfall charts: Show which things affect a number at time A vs time B, for example prior year profit to current year or headcount or sales.
- Map charts: Excel can now look up regions and have data showing on map charts
- Pareto charts: Uninteresting at first, this chart has some unexpected benefits
Why pdfs are dead
In his second talk, Why pdfs are dead – Build a visual interactive proposal in Sway, David taught participants how to put together a proposal using Microsoft Sway, an immersive mobile optimised application that can be interactive and visual. The end product looks something like this, you can try scrolling and seeing animations, moving images back & forth, interacting with an embedded dashboard, or playing the videos. David’s tutorial video on Sway can be seen here.
Setting up PowerPoint Morph & Zoom
Animations & transitions have been a key component to PowerPoint for a while, but in his final session of the day entitled Setting up PowerPoint Morph & Zoom: The next generation of transitions/animations, David explained how the new Morph feature replaces the need for many of them. Not only is the Morph feature slicker to the audience but also easier to use. He also covered how to transform slides into slick designs using advanced use cases of Design Ideas
Follow-up webinar with Q&A
In all these sessions, David gave a demo of these features during the session and then allowed participants to recreate the exercise file (shared by David) and repeat the actions in their own time by reviewing the recording. He then provided a follow-up webinar on Tuesday 27 October to answer any questions that attendees may have had.
David has also kindly created a OneDrive folder which he has agreed to share publicly using this link. Here you will find the following:
- Excel: The slides, recording, exercise and completed exercise file
- Sway: The slides, recording, exercise (via a Word doc to upload) and an image of how the Sway edit looks when complete.
- PowerPoint: The exercise & completed file & the recording (the “slides” file and exercise file are the same so there isn’t a duplicate).
A big thank you to David for sharing his expert knowledge in a way that is accessible and easy for all to understand!
If you have any further questions contact David Benaim at [email protected] or Paul Winder at [email protected]
MGI Worldwide with CPAAI is a top 20 ranked global accounting network and association with 10,000 independent auditors, accountants and tax experts in some 460 locations in over 100 countries around the world.