Latest posts
Visualizing Net Income from Inflows and Outflows; Issue #443 July 9 2019
Via Twitter I came across an interesting visual created by Nadieh Bremer to show the inflows and outflows that resulted in the Net income for an organization in their annual report. Here is the visual, used with Nadieh’s permission from her article. Here are some of...
Speed slide creation and enjoy the summer; Issue #442 June 25 2019
It is officially summer here in North America and the promise of warmer weather makes us want to get our work done quickly so we can go outside and enjoy the sun. In this article I want to share some tips and resources for speeding up the creation of PowerPoint slides...
Selecting Dataviz based on message; Issue #441 June 11 2019
In my recent sessions at regional AFP conferences I spoke about the issue of spreadsheets on slides in presentations of financial results and analysis. Business professionals copy these large tables of numbers on to slides because they think you need to have design...
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...
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...
Presentation Insight: 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...
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...
“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...
FinancialViz Makeover: Comparing multiple characteristics; Issue #435 March 19 2019
The latest FinancialViz makeover video I posted illustrates a situation we can often find ourselves in. We are comparing items to each other and we want to show multiple characteristics of the items to make our point. In this example from the November 2018 issue of...
Matching Excel charts to a PowerPoint color scheme; Issue #434 March 5 2019
If you create a graph in Excel, how do you get the colors to match the organization’s PowerPoint template? The two most common approaches are: 1) spend time typing in the RGB values for the correct colors into Excel for every graph, or 2) ignore the desire to make the...