A friend of mine called the other day asking for a favor.

My early-warning system should have immediately triggered, but it didn't. He needed a "four-slide presentation" for a speed-dating rendition of a marketing presentation. The kicker: the company running the forum needed a PowerPoint file.

If you've read my post on Keynote presentations, you'll understand some of my trepidation. To make matters worse, this friend happened to be the same client from my previous post.

Four slides. Minimal text. Single logo. No transitions. No animation. No problem.

At least that's what most people would think. Being me, I assembled the tools I anticpated needing: Illustrator, Photoshop, Keynote, NeoOffice (an OS X-specific build of OpenOffice). To quote the anonymous someone who often comments on everything I do: 'Just how many programs does it take to build four slides?'

The presentation-ette's focus was on his company's quality. First thing I didn't want was some canned PowerPoint presentation worthy of Dilbert.

I did want the presentation-ette to have as much thought-out-ness as I built into their other presentation. Being more familiar with Keynote, I started out there for the initial slide composition. A little bit of copy and paste from my friend's email and I had the basics of a working file. Not expecting too much fidelity in the export, I moved the slides over to NeoOffice.

Keynote's ability to accept a wide-range of image file types has spoiled me. I knew I would need to convert the EPS, Illustrator and native Photoshop files into PNGs or JPGs and render them at the appropriate resolutions. Once in NeoOffice, I started editing the text both to fit and to refine the message. I still felt the slides lacked something to help set them in context of the speed-dating setup, so I designed a logo in Illustrator, rendered and refined it in Photoshop and dropped in the JPG. All told, the entire process from organizing and communicating with my friend to building the presentation and logo took a couple of hours. As anyone in the design community knows and appreciates, any process of this sort requires a minimum block of time. I probably could have designed ten slides of a similar nature in a comparable amount of time.

All this work for a measly four slides? My friend gets sixty seconds in front of a room full of potential clients. Done right, these slides will enhance his speed-dating presentation. Done wrong and he'll be just another speed bump in the day.

Years ago my dad taught me that having the right tools for the job could enhance the final product. My dad is proud to know I'm teaching that same principle to my kids.