P2F2

Thanks for attending my pre-conference session at P2F2 2022 in Philadelphia. Below are some resources to further your skills on some of the topics I covered during the session. These are the types of skills I teach in my customized live virtual FinancialViz training courses.

Create charts that are easy to update and re-use

This is a 50-minute session I delivered at the Excel Virtually Global conference in October 2022. It shows you how to save a lot of time each month by designing and creating charts in Excel that are easy to update and re-use.

Fix the “values don’t add to 100% due to rounding” issue

This video explains why we see too many tables and charts that have a footnote about values not adding up due to rounding. This footnote makes viewers question if we know how to do the math correctly. The video gives a number of solutions so that viewers never question our math again.

Zoom in on chart values

This video shows you how to give the audience context first and then zoom in on the values in a chart. This is helpful when the values are close and the difference isn’t obvious unless the scale does not start at zero.

Zoom and pan around a table of numbers

This video shows you how to use the Morph feature of PowerPoint to zoom in on a section of a spreadsheet or table of numbers and then pan to another section so the viewer always has context.

Zoom in on a section of the screen when demonstrating software

During the session you saw me zoom in on the ribbon, a dialog box, or the task pane so you could more easily see what I was doing. Here’s a video that explains how to set up the Windows Magnifier to do this.

Non-zero-based column graphs

This article and video show how common it is that companies try to mislead viewers with column graphs that do not start the vertical axis at zero. Even if you aren’t trying to mislead you may end up with this as the default when creating an Excel column chart. This video explains why and how to force a column, bar, or line graph to have a zero-based measurement axis.

By 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.