Latest posts
2019 Gift List for Presenters; Issue #452 November 12 2019
I'm seeing Black Friday previews and pre-Black Friday sales have started. For the past couple of years I’ve put together a list of the products and services I use and recommend to those looking for gifts to give presenters or business professionals who have to create...
Highlighting an area with a mask; Issue #451 October 29 2019
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...
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:...
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...
5 Good reasons to use your corporate PowerPoint template; Issue #448 September 17 2019
How do most business professionals start creating their PowerPoint slides? They open a previous presentation and copy a few slides into a new file, making sure to click the Keep Source Formatting option so the template from the previous file gets applied. This is a...
Free training videos; Issue #447 September 3 2019
In our neighborhood the kids are heading back to school today. This often makes the rest of us think about upgrading our skills so today I want to highlight some free playlist s of videos I have on my YouTube channel that can help you make your presentations more...
3 Steps you can take to spend less time updating Excel charts each month (Hint: use a strategic approach to your Excel chart worksheet)
With organizations measuring more metrics than ever before, the time it takes to update all the charts you create for senior managers seems to increase each month. You’ve streamlined the analysis using tools in Excel like Power...
Zooming in on a column graph; Issue #446 August 20 2019
In a previous article I talked about giving context first for complex diagrams by showing the overall view before zooming in to look at the details. The same approach can apply to a column graph where the values don’t differ by much. Too often I see column graphs...
Big Data Tools and Executive Reporting; Issue #445 August 6 2019
In the opinion of some commentators, presentations of results and analysis to executives will soon be replaced by dashboards created with big data tools such as Power BI or Tableau. They claim that by giving executives access to these tools, the executives will be...
Comparing actual to budget with explanations; Issue #444 July 23 2019
Comparing actual spending to budgeted spending is an important topic in many presentations. Too often the actual and budget amounts are shown in a table and the audience is expected to subtract large numbers in order to understand the difference. My latest makeover...