This book contains a three step approach to help business professionals create effective presentation visuals. Step 1 is writing a headline that summarizes the message you want the audience to understand and remember from that slide. Step 2 is to select and create an effective visual for the slide. The book focuses on this step because corporate presenters have said they need the most help with this area. The different messages in business presentations are broken down into six categories. The 66 visuals shown are organized into 30 groups and sub-groups under the six categories. Each visual is explained, examples are shown, and tips for creating the visual are given. Step 3 is to focus the audience during the delivery of the slide by using callouts, building the slide piece by piece, and by organizing complex information.
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.
Fixing the Excel Rounding Error; Issue #329 January 20, 2015
When an executive sees a calculation error on your slide, how does it affect their view of the information you are presenting? It makes them question all the other data and analysis you did. But you checked your analysis and it is correct, so why is there an error on your slides? That’s what I…
Half-day strategic session for leadership group (January 20, 2016, St. Louis, MO)
Customized session for the leadership group in a utility to help them understand the advantages of taking a strategic approach to presentations to internal and external audiences, especially Board and Committee meetings. By understanding what they need to do before asking staff to prepare a presentation, the result will be a more effective presentation from…
5 steps to better presentations in 2015; Issue #328 January 6, 2015
At the start of the year we see many lists of predictions, trends, and resolutions for the upcoming year. In this article I want to share five steps you can take right away to improve your presentations this year. You don’t need to be a designer or an artist. Anyone can follow these five steps.…
The correct use of a pie chart; Issue #327 December 23, 2014
The correct use of a pie chart is to show one segment compared to the whole; Use bar charts for ranked values
Conference presentation for media company (December 16, 2015, Miami, FL)
Present a 90-minute session at a conference of the Finance and Accounting groups about communicating clear messages from financial analysis using effective visuals.
Updates to the PowerPoint Document Inspector may save your job
One of the big issues with copying cells or graphs from Excel into PowerPoint is that some of the common methods actually embed the Excel workbook into the PowerPoint file. This is a concern for two reasons. First, it makes your PowerPoint file larger, and second, it exposes all the data in the entire workbook,…
Full-day workshop for utility company (December 11, 2015, St. Louis, MO)
Customized full-day workshop for financial and other staff covering planning a presentation, creating effective visuals, and showing slide makeovers of their own slides to reinforce the ideas.
Why SmartArt is often misused; Issue #326 December 9, 2014
At my workshops I suggest that people not use the SmartArt feature of PowerPoint. Example slides I reviewed at a recent workshop reinforced how this feature is often misused. The big issue is that most people pick SmartArt based on how nice it looks vs. whether it effectively communicates the correct message. Let’s start with…
Full-day workshop for pharma company (December 9, 2015, North Chicago, IL)
Customized full-day workshop for engineering staff covering planning a presentation, creating effective visuals, and showing slide makeovers of their own slides to reinforce the ideas.