When my workshop participants ask how they can improve their presentation skills, I often suggest videotaping a presentation and watching it. You don’t need any fancy equipment these days to do this, your smartphone will give you a good quality video. In presentation skills training they videotape you presenting and a coach reviews it with…
Tag: 2017
6 ways to save time creating a presentation; Issue #403 November 28, 2017
As my latest survey indicated, professionals are creating and delivering more presentations each year. In a recent survey of incoming MBA students at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, two-thirds of the respondents said they presented on a daily or weekly basis. If professionals don’t figure out how to create effective presentations more efficiently, they will…
2017 Gift ideas for presenters; Issue #402 November 14, 2017
The holidays are just around the corner and if you are looking for a great gift for a presenter in your life, I have some suggestions for you. I regularly get asked what equipment I use, so I’ve put together a list of the items I have found most useful when presenting. With Black Friday,…
Document or Presentation? How to choose; Issue #401 October 31, 2017
One of the key results from my latest survey on annoying PowerPoint presentations was that too often professionals are presenting a document on the screen as a presentation. This overwhelms the audience, leaving them confused and upset. Professionals feel they need to include more and more content in their presentations to satisfy the requests of…
Another option for diverging bar charts; Issue #400 October 17, 2017
Use a diverging bar chart to compare two data series that are related
2017 Annoying PowerPoint survey results; Issue #399 October 3, 2017
In this newsletter I summarized a few of the results from the 2017 Annoying PowerPoint survey. You can read the full report here.
3 Alternatives to axis breaks; Issue #398 September 19, 2017
Twice in the past few months I have seen column charts with axis breaks. Some software makes it easy to create these types of charts. In this article I want to recommend against using this type of chart and offer some alternatives. To start with, what is an axis break chart and why would it…
Total on stacked columns/bars; Issue #397 September 5, 2017
Recently I wrote about how I think presenters should replace stacked column or bar graphs with better visuals (see the entire article here). In my customized workshops I have participants who need to create a stacked graph because the boss wants it or the audience expects to see the data presented that way. Often they…
Focus by using an All Others category; Issue #396 August 22, 2017
Use an All Others category when showing ranked data to focus on the most important categories
Proportion visual using characters; Issue #395 August 8, 2017
Use ISOTYPE or group of items visuals to show proportion of the whole