Whether you are a student, teacher, professor, employee or CEO of a company, an army general or an administrative officer, a doctor or an engineer, a financial wizard or a simple banker, you have to give a presentation at some point. Invariably, a map or geospatial intelligence is an essential part of any presentation today. And why not, with GPS, Google maps and geospatial technology, it has become so easy to relate data to the ground.
The old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words is truer for maps in a presentation. Data that can take dozens of slides to represent or explain can easily be put on a single thematic map. But how to do it without any GIS or geographic analysis tools. You can find a correct image by searching the net using Google image search. Sounds easy, but no. There are so many map images available on the net, but can you use them? Maybe not, why? Image may be copyrighted. So why not use images from ShutterStock or some similar website that offers images? Here, too, you have to buy a license and spend hours searching for the right map or image that matches the theme of your presentation.
So, should I hire a graphic artist to do a custom design for me? If the presentation is so important that you can spend hundreds of dollars on a custom map, then that’s fine. But if you want to get the job done with minimal budget and maximum performance, freeform PPT maps that can be edited right in the PowerPoint software itself are the answer. Yes, no need to buy an expensive photo editor, all you need are free-form editable maps and manipulate them with click and select in PowerPoint program.
You can download a free Alabama County freeform presentation from https://gumroad.com/l/udUA with fully editable content and an easy explanation to fit the slides to your selected topic. We have spent a lot of time thoroughly tracing all the counties as freeforms. You can even zoom in on a county’s freeform to make it slide all the way out and it will still retain its shape. An image, if it is enlarged that much, will definitely be pixelated and unusable at all. All of these freeform counties can be selected in one go and filled with a single color or individually, it all depends on what you want to feature.
So use the Alabama Free PPT map however you like for a while, adjust it, play around with it, and you’ll be so happy that it’s so easy to make your own design in minutes. And if you’d like all US counties to be editable freeforms, let me know.