Sometimes you have a complex image, maybe a process diagram, chemical structure, or detailed schematic. You want to focus on one area to explain your message and you want the viewer to have context of where that one area fits into the overall picture. In this article I show you how using a semi-transparent mask…
Author: Dave Paradi
Dave Paradi has over twenty-two years of experience delivering customized training workshops to help business professionals improve their presentations. He has written ten books and over 600 articles on the topic of effective presentations and his ideas have appeared in publications around the world. His focus is on helping corporate professionals visually communicate the messages in their data so they don't overwhelm and confuse executives. Dave is one of fewer than ten people in North America recognized by Microsoft with the Most Valuable Professional Award for his contributions to the Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams communities. His articles and videos on virtual presenting have been viewed over 4.8 million times and liked over 17,000 times on YouTube.
Adding a watermark to an Excel or PowerPoint chart/graph
What can you do if you want to share a chart via email, Slack, or Teams but the chart doesn’t have all of the final data yet or you want others to know it contains confidential data? A good solution is to place a watermark behind the chart so everyone knows it is a draft…
Virtual sessions for pharma company (October 19 – November 6, 2020)
Delivering six 90-minute sessions (equivalent to a 1.5-day workshop) covering how to structure content, reduce information overload, select the right visuals, present in a virtual setting, and the Excel and PowerPoint techniques to create effective visuals. Delivered over Zoom.
Professional looking graphs; Issue #450 October 15 2019
It is relatively easy to create a graph in Excel or PowerPoint. But is the default graph good enough for a business presentation? I don’t think so. Recently I wrote three articles on how to make professional looking graphs for the three most common types of graphs: column graphs, line graphs, and bar charts. I…
Virtual sessions for healthcare company (October 16 – December 11, 2020)
Delivering eight 90-minute sessions (equivalent to a two-day workshop) covering how to structure content, reduce information overload, select the right visuals, present in a virtual setting, and the Excel and PowerPoint techniques to create effective visuals. Delivered over Microsoft Teams.
Excel bar chart with conditional formatting based on MoM change %
Conditional formatting of Excel charts allows you to have the formatting of the chart update automatically based on the data values. A common approach is to use the values as the criteria as shown in the article and video on creating a conditional formatting column chart. In this article and video I want to show…
7 steps to make one line stand out in a spaghetti line graph
If you have a line graph with many lines and you want to focus the viewer on one of those lines, how can you do that? Here are 7 steps you can follow to make one line the focus in what is often called a spaghetti line graph (because the many lines can look like…
Lessons in creating effective Excel charts from the October 2019 SWD Challenge
Every month, Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic of storytelling with data posts a new challenge to help professionals think about how they can visually communicate a message from data. The October 2019 challenge is drawn from her new book and looks at how to communicate the message from a table of data related to revenue and number…
Virtual sessions for pharma company (October 2 – November 20, 2020)
Delivering eight 90-minute sessions (equivalent to a two-day workshop) covering how to structure content, reduce information overload, select the right visuals, present in a virtual setting, and the Excel and PowerPoint techniques to create effective visuals. Delivered over Microsoft Teams.
Results of the 2019 Annoying PowerPoint survey; Issue #449 October 1 2019
Thank you to everyone who took the time and shared your honest opinions about the PowerPoint presentations you see. I have compiled all the responses and produced a full report which is linked below. To give you the highlights, I’ve included here the executive summary and the results summary infographic. Click on the image or…