Accountants often use PowerPoint to present financial data to peers, executives, suppliers, and others. It is critical that others understand the impact of the financial analysis so that decisions can be made and the bottom line positively impacted. Unfortunately, too often the barrage of numbers is overwhelming to the audience and they leave confused. This…
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.
Don’t put yourself in a cage of text; Issue #290 July 9, 2013
When audience members tell me in my Annoying PowerPoint survey that the speaker reading the slides is the most annoying thing about bad PowerPoint slides, some of the blame must be put on the “wall of text” slides that presenters use. Today I want to talk about how all this text puts the presenter in…
Full-day workshop for network engineers (July 3, 2014, EMEA)
Customized full-day workshop delivered via webstream for network engineers in the EMEA region covering planning a presentation, creating effective visuals, and showing slide makeovers of their own slides to reinforce the ideas.
Eliminate 75% of the numbers; Issue #289 June 25, 2013
Information overload is the single biggest issue in presentations today according to audience members I have surveyed. In my book, Present It So They Get It, I devote a chapter to five strategies for laser focusing your information to avoid the overload problem. One of those strategies is to eliminate data that is not relevant…
The Globe and Mail June 24, 2013
Dave’s Proportional Shape Comparison Diagram Calculation Tool was featured in The Globe and Mail on June 24, 2013 here.
Full-day workshop for manufacturing company (June 19, 2014, London, ON)
Customized full-day workshop for a variety of employees covering planning a presentation, creating effective visuals, and showing slide makeovers of their own slides to reinforce the ideas.
Creating a single PowerPoint file that is a presentation and detailed backup
Probably the most common reason I hear for presenters overloading their slides with tables, charts, text, and other information is that today, PowerPoint files serve two purposes. The first purpose is to aid the presenter in presenting their message to the audience. Overloaded slides actually hinder the presenter and make it hard for the audience…
Visually showing procedures that include decisions; Slide Makeover #76
Communicate decisions and outcomes with a decision tree diagram instead of a numbered list
Presentation Xpert Newsletter June 14, 2013
Presentation Xpert newsletter republished Dave’s article on being prepared when VGA ports disappear from laptops. The article is on their site here.
Proportional Shape Comparison Diagrams; Issue #288 June 11, 2013
In February I launched a tool on my website that allows you to create diagrams like this: I refer to this type of diagram as a proportional shape comparison diagram because the size of the shapes allows the viewer to instantly compare the numbers each shape represents. These types of diagrams are popular in print…