Latest posts
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...
Showing future differences; Issue #433 February 19 2019
When we want to show the impact of a proposed change, one of the ways we can do it is to show a line graph of the current state and the proposed state with a shaded area between the two to emphasize the difference. This is much better than the default table of values...
Comparing only one value to a standard; Issue #432 February 5 2019
When you want to compare values to a standard, such as comparing output in various production plants to the goal, a dashed line on a column graph is a good visual to use. The dashed line runs across the graph and it is easy to see if each column is above or below the...
Showing difference with diverging bars; Issue #431 January 22 2019
To see how well we are doing in the current year, we compare this year’s results to last year’s results and to the budget we set at the start of the year. Too often presenters show a spreadsheet of the numbers and expect the audience to figure out the result. My...
Showing difference between this year and last year/budget; Slide Makeover #93
Visually show variances: This Year compared to Last Year and Budget To see how well we are doing this year, we compare this year’s results to last year’s results and to the budget we set at the start of the year. Too often we show a spreadsheet of the numbers and...