Whether you are a student, teacher, professor, an employee or CEO of a company, an Army General or an administrative officer, a doctor or an engineer, a financial wizard or a plain banker, you are required to make a presentation sometime. 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 ground.
The age old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words is more true for maps in a presentation. The data which may take tens of slides to represent or explain can be easily put in just one thematic map. But how to make it without any GIS or geographical analysis tools. You can find a right image by searching the net by Google Image search. Sounds easy, but no. There are so many map images available on the net but can you use them. May be no, why? The image may be copyrighted. So why not use images from ShutterStock or some similar website offering images. Here also you need to purchase license and spend hours searching for the right map or image which matches the theme of your presentation.
So should I hire a graphics artist to make a custom design for me. If the presentation is so important that you can spend hundreds of dollars for a custom map, then it is okay. But if you want to do the job in minimal budget with maximum output then the answer lies in freeform PPT maps editable in powerpoint software itself. Yes, no need purchase an expensive photo editor, all you need are editable freeform maps and manipulate them with click and select in the PowerPoint program.
You can download a free Alabama County Freeform Presentation from https://gumroad.com/l/udUA with fully editable content and easy explanation to conform the slides to your selected theme. We have spent a lot of time to painstakingly trace all the counties as freeforms. You can even zoom one county freeform to full slide and it will still retain its shape. An image if so zoomed will definitely break into pixels and not usable at all. All these freeform counties can be selected in one go and filled with single color or singly, it all depends on what you want to present.
So use the Alabama Free PPT map as you want for a while, tweak it, play with it and you will be so happy that it is so easy to make your own design in minutes. And if you want the whole of US counties as editable freeforms, please do let me know.
