Presenting a webinar for APQC on selecting visuals for financial dashboards and reports. This webinar is open to all and you can register here.
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.
Reflections on 20 years in business; Issue #440 May 28 2019
Twenty years ago today I worked my last day at Trimark Investments. That was my last day in the corporate world as a full-time employee. In the twenty years since then I have run my own business. Today I’d like to reflect on some of the lessons and joys of the last twenty years. I…
Half-day virtual session for Graduate Diploma in Business students (May 26, 2020)
Dave will be delivering a half-day session virtually to the Smith School at Queens University Graduate Diploma in Business students who come from across Canada.
Clues to indicate diagrams; Issue #439 May 14 2019
Participants in my customized workshops often find the makeovers I’ve done of their own slides the most impactful part of the session. The makeovers demonstrate how the ideas apply to the presentations they create and deliver. How do I know when to select a specific type of visual? I explain my entire process in my…
The Globe and Mail May 9, 2019
Suggestions from Dave’s article on giving context first before explaining complex topics were included in Harvey Schachter’s online Power Points column on May 9, 2019.
Showing component and total variance to budget; Slide Makeover #94
To explain the overall variance to the budget, we often look at the variances in each area. Too often the budget and variance amounts are shown in a table that the audience must interpret. This makeover demonstrates how you can use a steps to a total graph to show how each budgeted amount and variance…
Showing component and total variance to budget; Issue #438 April 30 2019
A common message in financial, project update, and operations presentations is to explain the total variance in expenses to the budget by looking at the variance in each expense line item. The common approach is to show the spreadsheet of numbers extracted from the accounting system. My latest slide makeover shows how you can visually…
Klear Online Influencers April 22 2019
Dave was ranked as the #2 PowerPoint Influencer by Klear (who ranks online influencers) behind fellow Microsoft MVP Geetesh Bajaj of Indezine.com.
For complex topics, give context first; Issue #437 April 16 2019
How do you present a complex topic that may be hard for the audience to understand? Don’t follow two common pieces of advice. Don’t try to make your topic simple, as some would advise. Complex and simple are opposites. If you have a complex topic, it will always be complex, it can’t be simple. And…
“Torn paper” look for non-zero axis; Issue #436 April 2 2019
In my Twitter feed I saw a number of well respected data visualization experts liking a recent article by RJ Andrews for the Data Visualization Society. In it he talks about the issue of starting the axis of a graph at a value other than zero. This is a common topic in the dataviz world…