I recently ran a few training sessions about how to visualize and present complex data. The high point was a series of “extreme slide makeovers” in which I honed the message and cleaned up visuals from existing presentations. Here are some ideas to tame busy, confusing slides.

1. Simplify your slide master, make room for content. Fancy borders, elaborate fonts, and background images do little to impress your audience. They leave little room for communication, either. For those saddled with frilly corporate slides, you’ll have to take on the Brand Standards Police.

   It may help to get quantitative. Consider this PowerPoint standard slide master. Less than 50% of the total slide area (highlighted in green) is available for content.

   

2. Say something once, why say it again? The Talking Heads sang: You're talkin' a lot, but you're not sayin' anything / When I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed / Say something once, why say it again?

   Wordy slides can be confusing and tedious. The author is using a lot of words—and often lots of qualifiers—in hopes that the core point lies somewhere within. The burden of synthesis is shifted to the audience. That’s not fair.

3. Make one point per slide. The take-away sentence on your slide should clearly state your point; the data on the slide should support that point. Any information that is tangential to the key concept can be pushed to an appendix or supporting slide.

4. Redundancies cause unnecessary repetition. I was surprised in my slide makeovers how often I found information that could be consolidated to simplify the slide. Redundancy came in many forms: multiple graphs repeating the same legend, axis labels that are described in a chart title, restating the same point.

5. Christmas is over, take down the decorations. Clear out clip art, “screenbeans”, and other images used to dress up the slide. Most effects are less “dazzling” than you might think. Eliminate gradients, shadows, 3D effects, and most animations. These design effects were exciting 10 years ago. But if they don’t help you communicate, move on.

   On the other hand, consider using full-screen photos as a way to convey a idea or theme, accompanied by few words. Here’s an example from a presentation I gave a few months back:

   

6. Reduce chart-junk. Excel and PowerPoint charts come pre-packaged with a heaping helping of chart-junk (“unnecessary or confusing visual elements”). Here are a few things I change in a default column chart: no shaded background, grey gridlines, no chart outline, no y-axis line, no column outlines, turn off auto resize text, change column colors to increase contrast. If you want to save yourself from chart-junk induced carpal tunnel syndrome, check out Chris’ chart cleaner Excel add-in. Sometimes charts aren’t necessary at all. If you’re using a pie or stacked column chart to show a single data point, the number alone will do the job more clearly.

   

7. Delete your “Text-junk” too. Text can contain “chart-junk” too—visual distractions in text that dilute your message.

   • Title Capitalization or Other Excessive and inconsistent use of Capital Letters. Title caps doesn’t make sense to use and is more difficult to read.
   • Underlining. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, use bold or italics.
   • Don’t use bullets when there is only one item or sentence. People have become so accustomed to using bullets that they’ll use them when they are totally unnecessary.
   • Bad fonts: The worst is Comic Sans MT, as the LMNOP blog describes: “These days, just like an e-mail from an “@ aol.com” address has a distinct lack of credibility, an e-mail written in this font makes the sender seem ridiculous and out of touch.”

8. Simplify style and formatting. Inconsistent colors, fonts, font sizes, and other styles are a subtle distraction. Limit yourself to three font colors (emphasis!, normal, low-emphasis), three font sizes, and three font styles. Here’s an example.

   Three colors

   

   Three sizes

   

   Three font-styles

   

   Putting it all together

   

All these points can be summed up as: Make everything on your slide serve your story. Best wishes for 2008!

Developer's Guide - Google Chart API - Google Code

Beautiful stuff, particularly the Venn diagram.

Align Journal - BI Worst Practices

We often see articles on BI "Best Practices" here is an article telling us what NOT to do.

flot - Google Code

Attractive Javascript plotting for jQuery.

ongoing · On Communication

Interesting blog post about how different forms of communication rank for immediacy, lifespan, and audience reached.

The Excel Magician: 70+ Excel Tips and Shortcuts to help you make Excel Magic : Codswallop

SlideShare

Source for presentation ideas.

Find and Download Great-Looking Excel and PowerPoint Charts

Chart Chooser is an online tool that answers two questions we commonly get:

1. What type of chart should I use to show my data?
2. How can I make good looking Excel or PowerPoint charts?

Chart Chooser is easy:

1. Check the boxes on the left that best describe your objective
2. Select the chart that you want to use
3. Choose from Excel or PowerPoint downloads to get a formatted chart template

A few notes about Chart Chooser:

• Thanks to Andrew Abela of Extreme Presentations for inspiring Chart Chooser with his “Choosing a Good Chart” post and for working with us to put this tool together.
• We’ve tried to make the charts both Tufte-compliant (i.e. minimal chart-junk) and visually attractive (thanks to Google for the color scheme).
• Feel free to suggest other types of charts that you’d like to see in the Chart Chooser. Send an example to chartchooser@juiceanalytics.com.
• If you’d like a customized version of Chart Chooser for your organization, write us at chartchooser@juiceanalytics.com or call me at 202.251.7750.

Death by PowerPoint » SlideShare

Quick inspiration for great presentations.

Role Modellers - Home

Software to manage human collaborative work via a workflow motif. Driven by Human Interaction Management.

Last week, Google released Presentations to fill out their portfolio of online, collaborative document types (they already offer text documents and spreadsheets). The Google folks were kind enough to include us in a round of beta testing a few weeks back, giving us a chance to preview this application, find bugs, and offer feedback.

If you give Google Presentations a try, you may be struck by its limitations. It doesn't offer much flexibility in creating presentations, especially when compared to Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple Keynote. The best you can do is create simple text slides on a few predefined templates. On the other hand, it offers unique capabilities you don't get with desktop applications. In particular, we were impressed with how easy it was to share a presentation live online.

I have started to wonder whether calling Google Presentations a "web-based competitor to PowerPoint" or "a PowerPoint clone" was simplistic and misguided. Lumping together software tools is a natural reaction to long lists of features and techno-terminology. Software vendors don't make it any easier to distinguish the differences when they attempt to convince us that their solution is the complete, do-everything tool to satisfy all your [presentation/data analysis/communication/networking] needs.

So, we assume our software tools fall into neat buckets. We assume the tool we are using today do everything we need "well enough." And we assume any new tool is a direct competitor to what we use. As a result, we are severely limited in what we can achieve.

For a long time, I was a fan and a heavy user of PowerPoint. It did what I needed. Perhaps I told myself that what it did was all I needed. A while ago, I had to break off this exclusive relationship.

Now, I find myself using a bunch of different tools to communicate information. On the one hand, this has made my life more complicated. There are new applications to learn and the hassle of moving documents around. But in other ways, it's easier. I use tools designed for the task at hand. And I have opened up a whole new realm of what is possible in terms of organization, polish, and audience engagement.

The table below shows the activities involved in business presentations. For each activity, I have a rough assessment of how well PowerPoint, Keynote, and Google Presentation perform. I also list the current Juice toolset.