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Home » Article » Presentation Design Basics: A Guide for Salesforce Administrators

• Presentation Design Basics: A Guide for Salesforce Administrators

Here’s a situation we can all recall: You have to give a presentation, and it’s time to start creating the slide deck. You begin by opening PowerPoint, making a title slide, putting some bullet points on the intro slide, and inserting a cute picture — and then you hit a wall. You give yourself kudos for getting this far and go get some coffee. You may think to yourself, “I’m not the best at using PowerPoint — there’s got to be a better way!”

It’s not about how pretty your slides are (well, it is, but that comes later). The basis of designing and delivering an awesome presentation is to craft a story and use visuals to support and strengthen that story.

This is especially key for the data-heavy presentations you create. Salesforce Admins and power users are in a unique position to help leadership understand business success metrics from reports and dashboards. But if you show slide after slides of charts and numbers, your audience won’t hear the story you’re telling.

In this post, you’ll learn how three Salesforce experts craft effective, impactful, and beautiful presentations. Sara Cattanach crafts messaging and content for the keynote presentations at Salesforce World Tour experiences, and coaches speakers to deliver great presentations. Aaron Rabideau and Gabrielle Tabios are the masterminds behind the presentation visuals at Salesforce’s largest events, including the Dreamforce keynote . Over and over again, they make it clear that slide design exists to support the presentation narrative.

Start with the narrative

Some of the best presentations have little or no visual elements. A slide deck is there to back you up, not to be the central focus. You want your audience members to leave saying, “What a great presentation!” not “What a great deck.” Your spoken delivery of the presentation is what will convince, inspire, or educate your audience.

Secret #1: Get the narrative, and titles, down completely before you start on the visuals. Otherwise, you’ll be rearranging slides and editing content when you change your story — you’ll end up doing twice the work on the presentation design elements.

When Sara is at square one starting a new presentation, she begins in a spreadsheet by writing out the narrative, with each slide title in its own row. When she has the story down, she goes to the speaker for the first round of feedback — before making a single slide.

Secret #2: Write the story of your presentation the way you write an essay. There should be a beginning, middle, and end. Different industries will have different ways of crafting stories, and knowing your audience is essential. Here are a few common structures:

• Thesis, supporting points, conclusion
• Summary, question posed, hypothesis, exploration, conclusion
• Problem, solution (it’s your company), how your offerings work, call to action (for example: “Learn more here,” or “Go deeper with small-group event sessions”)
• For a key or novel idea: what exists now, compare and contrast feature by feature

Every presentation should be tailored to your audience with a clear goal in mind. Is the point to convince investors to back your product? That’s a very different presentation than the first call deck your sales team will use about that same product. A presentation to your peers about research findings may rely much more on text and supporting stats than the same content delivered to an audience that is not as immersed in the field. Below are a few great examples of clear titles and narratives:

Why visuals matter

Aaron breaks down slide design into three basic tenets:

1. Hierarchy: Is it clear what the primary and secondary messages are? Are messages on the slide competing? Is the title actively working to reinforce your visuals?

2. Balance: Are you using the entire workspace? Is one thing too big compared to another?

3. Alignment: Do titles shift or fonts change size from slide to slide? Do you have clear margins across the entire deck?

The first step he takes when sitting down with a speaker is to say, “Tell me what it is you want me to know.” Aaron’s tips center around two basic goals for visuals: Have each slide reinforce (not distract from) the points in the narrative, and have the visuals be so organized that the audience experience is seamless. In short, you want the presenter to look good.

People are inherent problem solvers. If they see something wrong on a slide, they may not have the design eye to pick out exactly what’s wrong, but their attention will be taken away from what you are saying as they subconsciously work to figure out what’s off.

For example, putting up an even slightly blurry image will divert from what’s being said. Visuals are there to support the speaker and should never detract from the spoken presentation (read: no slides full of long bullet points or low-quality Google-sourced images!).

Taking the extra time upfront to clean up your slides reinforces that you take your presentation, audience, and message seriously. It’s why companies will spend big money on creative agencies that obsess over the details of an ad — if something is sloppy, it reflects poorly on the company. Set yourself up for success by creating consistency and a high standard for quality across your entire deck.

The basics of presentation design

By now, you should be convinced that PowerPoint is not your starting point. After you’ve nailed down your story, and the titles of each of your slides, you can finally get to what you came to this article for: creating impactful slides. The minute details and wizardry of slide creation are best left to training courses, but there are some important points to take home.

1. Each slide should convey one idea. If there are two ideas, break it into two slides. Gabrielle lays out a basic slide breakdown: The top-level thing is what you want the audience to grab right away (a callout, a key visual, or the title). The secondary element supports that first thing, and smaller elements can also be inserted if they don’t overwhelm the slide.

2. Consistency is key. Slide elements should be aligned: Things sit in the same place, are the same color, are the same size, and have the same amount of space between them. Use bold text minimally and a maximum of one highlight color.

3. Text should be minimized. The details of a slide — a picture, callout stat, quote, or subtitle — can support what you’re saying, but the slide shouldn’t speak for you. Newer speakers may need longer titles to help them remember the narrative while presenting. The better you get at storytelling, the less you will need those cues, and the more you can pare down the text on your slides to put your audience’s focus on your words.

4. Recurring images help enhance the narrative. Put a lot of thought into how your images support a slide’s key idea, make sure you use high-quality images, and consider using recurring images. Salesforce uses customer heroes that are tailored to our audience — customers who champion a specific product or are from the segment or industry that best matches who’s in the room. We often introduce this hero at the beginning with a theme — like “customer success” — and then bring them back in at later points to remind the audience of that theme. Even if they don’t consciously pick up on the reminder, using a recurring high-impact image will help shape your story arc and give consistency to your message.

This slide draws the eye to the three main ideas and has supporting design elements containing characters to add in the fun and unify the theme.

Aaron gave one final piece of advice for designing slides, a pithy manifesto: “ If you can’t afford to be minimalist, be clear. ”

Learn more with these Trailhead modules:

• Storytelling and Communication
• Create Rad Content
• Use Storytelling in Presentations
• Virtual Presentations

Alice Avery

Alice Avery is a Product Marketing Director for the Customer Success team at Salesforce. As an advocate for the company's industry leadership in helping customers reach their digital transformation goals, she champions more than 20 years of best practices and expertise through content, research, and events.

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In this guide, we will explore how to bridge the gap between what is technically possible and how it can be best utilized to create efficient and delightful user experiences.

Problem: Lightning Pages are Being Underutilized

Reason: Not a Technical Issue, But a Design Challenge

Solution: leveraging the power of upn diagrams.

Summary: Harnessing the Lightning

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Xavery Lisinski is the VP of Product Management at Elements.cloud .

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About 10 mins

Learning Objectives

Activity timeline, recap the latest activities, find the activities that matter most, more activity timeline features, tasks and task lists, keep your to-dos up to date, view other calendars, see your salesforce data as dates on a calendar, calendars in action, send email from anywhere, email features in lightning experience, send an email to a group, email templates, list email and email templates in action.

• Challenge +100 points

Discover More

Manage your tasks, events, and email.

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Review your activity history and see what’s coming up next in the activity timeline.
• Update tasks.
• Work efficiently with calendar events.
• Identify two places from which you can send email in Lightning Experience.

When you look at a record in Salesforce Classic, such as a contact or opportunity, you use the Open Activity and Activity History related lists to stay on top of activities.

In Lightning Experience, the details in those lists are surfaced in a more intelligent way in the activity timeline.

It’s like an activity control center for everything relating to the record you’re on. Instead of going to different related lists to get an overview, it’s all in one place, and directly in the record that you’re focused on.

And it’s exclusive to Lightning Experience, so enjoy!

Your colleague is out of the office, and you’re handling their accounts until they get back. When a client calls, how do you get up to speed on what’s been happening?

Or maybe it’s you who’s been out of the office. Now you’re back, and need to find out what’s happened while you’ve been gone.

In either case, the activity timeline is your best friend.

Let’s look at some of the ways you can review what’s been going on with this client.

The first thing you notice is that the activity timeline is divided into Upcoming & Overdue (1) and past months (2), so you can see what’s planned and what’s already happened. You can expand and close a month by clicking the buttons (3).

If you need more details about an activity, click the expand button (4) next to the left of the activity and click the button again to close it when you’re done. Or, click Expand All (5) to see details for all the activities.

See more of what’s coming up by clicking View More (6).

If you’ve been working with an account, opportunity, or other record for any length of time, you probably have a mix of activities in the activity timeline. How do you find the details you’re looking for?

Use the filters in settings to narrow your search. By filtering on activity type and date range, you can find the key details in no time.

There’s so much more that you can do in the activity timeline.

As you review the list, you can update an activity. From the activity row, click the dropdown arrow and editing options appear.

Or, as you complete a task, click the checkbox to mark it complete.

You can find many ways to use the activity timeline as you explore Lightning Experience.

There’s no Tasks tab in Salesforce Classic beyond the My Tasks list on the Home page.

But sometimes you want to see what’s on your whole to-do list, not just what’s coming up for a particular contact or account. And wouldn’t it be nice to jump straight to your task lists from any page instead of always needing to navigate to the Home page?

That’s when the Lightning Experience tasks page comes in handy.

It’s easy to get to, plus it’s a one-stop shop for creating tasks and managing what’s already on your plate. Click the Tasks tab, or click View All from the Today's Tasks list on the Lightning Experience Home page.

Another great aspect of the task list is that while you see the list on the left, expanded details appear to the right for whichever task you have selected.

Click a task on the left, and see that info on the right.

Lightning Experience includes several quick actions in the detail view—just click the dropdown —that make it efficient to update tasks. You can change status, change priority, edit, and delete.

Or, click Mark Complete to mark the task complete. You can also mark tasks complete from any list view. Of course, tasks are also shown in the activity timeline for the record you are looking at, and you can edit them there too.

Salesforce Classic includes a calendar to help remind you about appointments.

But the calendar in Lightning Experience takes it further, to keep you working even more efficiently.

The first thing you notice is the Calendar tab, making it easy to get to your schedule.

Creating an event is quick and easy too. Click New Event , or click the day and time the event starts and drag the cursor to the time the event ends. The New Event dialog box appears, with the start and end times already filled out. Enter the event details, and click Save .

What’s especially helpful in Lightning Experience is how you can share your calendar and view calendars your colleagues have shared with you, all from your calendar. 

Plus, you can add multiple calendars at the same time with user lists. If you don’t see user lists as a search category in the Add Calendars dialog box, ask your admin about setting up user list calendars.

Shared calendars make it easy to see when events overlap. For example, you can see when a coworker is busy to make sure she’s available for a day-long event that you need to schedule.

Keep in mind that your admin can limit the details that everyone can share with others. Also, admins with the View All Data permission can view user calendars even if they’re not shared.

If you want to focus on just one calendar, click the colored squares for the other calendars to stop seeing them. Click the squares again to make a calendar reappear.

A handy way to use a calendar is to see your Salesforce data as events on a calendar. This screenshot shows opportunity close dates on your calendar.

It’s easy to do—just create a calendar for the data you’re interested in.

Choose the object you want to see on your calendar, and select date fields that represent the data you want to track, like pending close dates.

Now you’ve got a bird’s-eye view of what’s coming up. Examining the screenshot, it looks like you’ll have a busy week of closing deals. Now you can plan accordingly and reschedule some meetings, or just block out some time to “always be closing.”

If pictures are worth a thousand words, then videos are even better at bringing concepts to life. So here’s a quick one about using calendars in Lightning Experience.

Even though there are many ways to communicate today, your customers still rely heavily on email, and so do you.

In Salesforce Classic, you generally create and send emails from the HTML Email Status related list.

That’s also where you can see what’s already been sent.

In Lightning Experience, you have several options for creating and sending emails. The Activity Composer on a record and the Global Actions menu are the options you’ll probably use most.

As you can see in this screenshot of the email composer, just like Salesforce Classic, when you send an email from a record, it fills in the To address for you. If a Person Account has an email address, it’s also filled in automatically—but only in Lightning Experience.

Imagine that you’ve just remembered that you need to send a thank-you note to a contact. Click the Email quick action to open the email composer—you don’t need to be on the correct record first—and fill in the details. Remember to update the To field so it’s going to the correct person! You’ll see the email on the recipient’s activity timeline.

Within the email composer, there are several features that make your email even more powerful.

One of the first things you’ll notice is that you can relate the email to another record, like the opportunity you’re working on.

Then you’ll see the email in context, in the activity timeline, when you look at the opportunity.

You can also do more in the email composer: add attachments, insert merge fields, insert or create a template, preview your email before you send it, erase what’s in the email and start over, and expand the email composer for more space.

You’ve used group emails—called Mass Email in Salesforce Classic—to reach many customers at once.

You can do the same in Lightning Experience for contacts and leads, with the List Email feature. In Lightning Experience, you start from a saved list view, where your list has already been filtered to focus on a group of recipients.

In the list email, you can include templates and merge fields, as well as attachments (2), to be even more efficient. And be sure to check the Review tab to confirm that the recipients and any merge fields appear the way you want them to (1) before clicking Send .

Sending emails to a group can do a lot for increasing your outreach efforts.

Lightning Experience includes two new types of email templates that you can create. With Lightning templates, including templates you can create in Email Template Builder, you enjoy rich text support and easy file preview and sharing. Just send the email attachment as a link. And it’s easy to keep these templates up-to-date.

However, if you need Letterhead, Custom HTML, or Visualforce templates, you may want to continue using your Classic templates until these features are available in Lightning templates.

You can easily access your existing Classic Text, Custom HTML, and Letterhead email templates in Lightning Experience. You just edit them in Salesforce Classic. When selecting a template, choose All Classic Templates from the dropdown list.

Let’s wrap up by seeing List Email and email templates in action. This video shows how to send personalized emails to a group.

• Help : Keyboard Shortcuts
• Trailhead : Sales Productivity, see the Help Your Reps Use Activities unit
• Help : Activity Timeline
• Salesforce Video : Use Tasks to Boost Your Sales Productivity
• Help : Tasks
• Help : Calendar Views in Lightning Experience
• Help : Use Calendars to Track and Visualize Dates in Salesforce Objects in Lightning Experience
• Help : Send Email Through Salesforce

• Lightning Web Components

Leveraging TypeScript in Salesforce Development: A Comprehensive Guide

• Sep 5, 2024

TypeScript has been gaining significant popularity among developers in recent years, and for good reason. As a strongly-typed superset of JavaScript, it offers enhanced features that can greatly improve code quality and developer productivity. In this blog post, we’ll explore how you can leverage TypeScript within the Salesforce ecosystem, particularly with Lightning Web Components (LWC). Join us to learn about Leveraging TypeScript in Salesforce Development: A Comprehensive Guide.

Why Use TypeScript with Salesforce?

• Improved Code Quality: TypeScript’s static typing helps catch errors during development, reducing runtime issues.
• Enhanced Productivity: Features like auto-completion and type inference speed up development.
• Better Code Maintainability: Types make code more self-documenting and easier to refactor.
• Closer Alignment with Web Standards: TypeScript brings your components closer to web standards and new browser features.

TypeScript Support in Salesforce:

As of Winter ’25, Salesforce offers developer preview support for authoring Lightning Web Components using TypeScript v5.4.5 and later. This allows developers to either create new components in TypeScript or convert existing JavaScript components.

Getting Started with TypeScript in LWC:

1. Enable TypeScript Support:

• Ensure you have a `tsconfig.json` file in your project’s root directory.
• Set the `target` compiler option to “ESNext”.
• Make sure `experimentalDecorators` is set to false or unset.

2. Add TypeScript to Your Project:

•    Run `npm install typescript –save-dev` to add TypeScript as a dev dependency.

3. Converting Existing Components:

• Change the file extension from `.js` to `.ts`.
• Run the TypeScript compiler and resolve any compilation errors.

Examples of TypeScript in Salesforce

1. lightning web component, advantages:.

• A clear definition of the Contact interface ensures consistent data structure.
• Type-safe properties prevent accidental assignment of incorrect data types.
• Return type inference improves code readability and maintainability.
• Type-safe event handling reduces runtime errors related to event properties.

2. Salesforce Function

• Custom type definition for AccountRecord ensures consistent data structure across the function.
• Type-safe function parameters prevent passing incorrect argument types.
• Type-safe query result ensures proper handling of returned data.
• Type-safe array operations reduce potential runtime errors when working with complex data structures.

3. Salesforce CLI Plugin:

• Type-safe flag definitions ensure correct usage of command-line arguments.
• Type-safe method signature improves code reliability and maintainability.
• Type-safe connection creation prevents runtime errors due to incorrect configuration.
• Type inference for query results reduces the chances of accessing non-existent properties.

Using TypeScript in Different Salesforce Contexts

1. Lightning Web Components (LWC):

•  Limited support is currently available.
•  Use JSDoc constructs to specify types.
•  Enable type checking with the `//@ts-check` flag or by setting `checkJs: true` in `jsconfig.json`.

2. Lightning Web Runtime (LWR):

•  Full TypeScript support for off-platform single-page applications.
•  Use `.ts` files for components.

3. Salesforce Functions:

•  TypeScript is a supported language for creating Salesforce Functions.
•  Utilize the Salesforce Function SDK for Node.js for pre-defined types.

4. Salesforce CLI Plugins:

• Built using TypeScript on top of OCLIF.
• Leverages the `@salesforce/ts-types` library for common types and type-narrowing functions.

5. Slack Apps:

• Use TypeScript with the `@slack/bolt` library for building Slack apps.

Salesforce Lightning Types:

Salesforce provides type definitions for its packages via the `@salesforce/lightning-types` Node package. To use these types:

• Install the package: `npm install @salesforce/lightning-types`
• Create a TypeScript file to import the typings.
• Reference the file in your `tsconfig.json`.

Pros of Using TypeScript in Salesforce:

• Enhanced Code Quality: TypeScript’s static typing helps catch errors during development, reducing runtime issues and improving overall code reliability.
• Improved Developer Productivity: Features like auto-completion, type inference, and better IDE support speed up development and make it easier to work with complex codebases.
• Better Code Maintainability: Types make code more self-documenting, easier to understand, and simpler to refactor, especially in large projects.
• Early Error Detection: TypeScript can catch many errors at compile-time that would only be discovered at runtime in JavaScript.
• Enhanced Refactoring: TypeScript’s type system makes it safer and easier to perform large-scale refactoring.
• Improved Collaboration: Types serve as a form of documentation, making it easier for team members to understand and work with each other’s code.

Cons of Using TypeScript in Salesforce:

• Learning Curve: Developers need to learn TypeScript syntax and concepts, which can be challenging for those new to typed languages.
• Additional Setup: TypeScript requires configuration and compilation steps, which can add complexity to the development process.
• Limited Support: As of now, TypeScript support in Salesforce is still in developer preview, meaning some features and integrations may be limited or subject to change.
• Potential Overhead: The compilation step can add a small amount of time to the build process, which might be noticeable in larger projects.
• Type Definition Maintenance: As your project grows, maintaining type definitions can become an additional task, especially for complex or frequently changing data structures.
• Incomplete Type Definitions: Some third-party libraries or Salesforce-specific features may lack comprehensive type definitions, requiring developers to create their own or use `any` types, which reduces the benefits of TypeScript.

Considerations and Limitations:

• TypeScript support is still in developer preview for LWC.
• Some features like using TypeScript with Salesforce CLI and source map debugging are not yet supported.
• Type definitions for custom Salesforce fields and objects are not available.
• While TypeScript offers many benefits, it’s important to weigh these against the potential overhead and learning curve for your team.
• Consider gradually adopting TypeScript in your Salesforce projects, starting with new components or modules and slowly converting existing ones as needed.

Conclusion:

Incorporating TypeScript into your Salesforce development workflow can significantly enhance your code quality and productivity. While full support is still evolving, the current capabilities allow developers to start leveraging TypeScript’s benefits in various Salesforce contexts. As Salesforce continues to expand its TypeScript support, we can expect even more robust integration in the future.

As with any technology choice, it’s crucial to evaluate whether TypeScript aligns with your team’s skills, project requirements, and long-term goals. While it offers significant advantages in terms of code quality and maintainability, the decision to adopt TypeScript should be made after careful consideration of both its benefits and potential challenges in your specific Salesforce development context.

• https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/platform/lwc/guide/ts.html#why-should-i-develop-lwcs-with-typescript
• https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/2022/03/how-to-use-typescript-with-salesforce-part-1
• https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/2022/04/how-to-use-typescript-with-salesforce-part-2
• https://medium.com/totally-typescript/demystifying-typescript-decorators-real-world-use-cases-best-practices-b4ebec8d5c09

Anand Dosapati

Salesforce Solution Architect

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