Interview with Shai Schwartz of VisualBee, automatic PowerPoint design software

VisualBee was a Gold Sponsor of my Outstanding Presentations Workshop last fall. To bring you more information about this unique product, I interviewed Shai Schwartz, VP Creative & Marketing, of VisualBee.

Question: Please describe briefly what VisualBee does.

Answer: VisualBee is a Free PowerPoint 2007/10 plug-in that automatically designs presentations. VisualBee uses the existing content and adds appropriate graphics to create an effective PowerPoint presentation. Using our software you won’t need to worry about the look anymore and can be completely focused on your content. Once your presentation messages are ready in simple slides, just let VisualBee to do the rest of the work for you, selecting your favorite design from its gallery. Once the presentation enhancement is done, you save it in PowerPoint format and can continue to edit your content as usual. Our Premium offer gives you even larger variety of professional designs,  images, and features, such as automatically adding your own logo on every slide.

Question: Why did you decide to create software that does PowerPoint slide makeovers?

I’ve been working in the PowerPoint business for over 10 years now, helping people to create better presentation with better content and better design. I’ve noticed that although most people know what they want to say, they find many difficulties working with Microsoft PowerPoint. Some have technical difficulties, others don’t really have the talent to make slides look nice and clear–they end up with a presentation that is practically unreadable, and you can see how their audience is lost or just bored with it. I thought it could be a miracle if some simple software could take the burden off those people and take care of all the design of the presentation, setting them free to deal with the important messages and not the look.

Question: Can you provide some success stories—how customers have used your product?

We launched VisualBee 2.0 about 6 weeks ago and already have close to 10,000 users. People like the idea because they know the pain of creating PowerPoint for themselves. We have several hi-tech companies that are using our software on a day-to-day basis such as Alvarion, PwC, and many others. We feel VisualBee can help mainly that group called “the individual business user,” all those freelancers and self-employed people who are using PowerPoint and cannot afford to pay a design studio or graphic designer, yet still need to have a professional presentation in order to make the best impression on their clients.

You can download the free version here.