Latest posts

Below are the most recent articles or resources I’ve published. If you are looking for help on a specific topics, it would best to look at the topics in my Articles archive as I have grouped my recent and best articles by topic there.

  • Makeover Monday Challenge February 15 2016

    Compare the same measurement categories across different groups visually Continue reading

  • Making table criteria explicit; Issue #356 February 2, 2016

    Tables are a great way to help your audience understand a comparison between two or more options. The challenge is to make sure that the table makes the comparison clear. Just adding a table to a slide is not enough. Here is a slide submitted by a participant in a recent customized workshop. The problem…… Continue reading

  • Formatting bullet points; Issue #355 January 19, 2016

    As I say in my customized workshops and I have said before, I believe that text slides continue to play an important role in business presentations. Not the text slides that are paragraphs that the presenter reads to the audience, but key text phrases that give your audience context for what you are saying. In…… Continue reading

  • Converting bullets to text grouped in shapes; Slide Makeover #83

    Present bullet/sub-bullet text visually using text in shapes Continue reading

  • Sources of business visuals on Twitter; Issue #354 January 5, 2016

    In my customized workshops I often share examples inspired by visuals for data I see online from news organizations. I have done makeovers of these as well (see this article). Why should business presenters pay attention to the visuals that news organizations create? Because our audiences are seeing these visuals and expect us to be…… Continue reading

  • Organic highlighting using ink; Issue #353 December 22, 2015

    At the recent Microsoft MVP Summit we were discussing inking in PowerPoint. It is relatively rare that inking is useful in business presentations, as callouts usually serve as a better way to direct the audience’s attention to a particular spot on a slide. But as I watched what they were discussing, I realized that we…… Continue reading

  • Deciding on how to label column, bar, and line graphs

    On a graph that uses a measurement axis, like column, bar, and line graphs, one question that comes up is how the graph should be labelled. Should you use an axis, use data labels, or use both? The default in Excel and PowerPoint is to have the axis only. In this article I want to…… Continue reading

  • Clearer line graphs; Issue #352 December 7, 2015

    In my book Select Effective Visuals, I discuss that a line graph is the best visual to use when your message is to show the trend in a series of data. I also wrote a newsletter earlier this year on why line graphs are better than column graphs to show trends (click here to read…… Continue reading

  • Change at a pace your audience can handle; Issue #351 November 24, 2015

    Many business professionals have regular presentations they deliver. It could be a bi-weekly project update presentation in engineering, it could be the monthly financial summary to management, it could be weekly call center statistics, or it could be a monthly sales update. If you have been delivering this presentation for a while now, you have…… Continue reading

  • Math errors; Issue #350 November 10, 2015

    What does an audience think when they see a math error on a slide? Do they ignore it and trust the numbers the presenter is discussing? Or do they start to question all the numbers and wonder what other mistakes there might be? My experience is that they start to question the numbers they are…… Continue reading