Presentations - The Right Chart, Part 1

This cast describes how to choose the right chart for your data and message in a presentation.

There are so many things wrong with presentations today, it’s almost impossible to decide where to begin. We frankly hope that some larger firms will figure out that it’s worth the time (and therefore budget) to teach all incoming professionals how to give a presentation. The reason one training/HR executive gave for NOT doing this was that all it would do is make their employees more marketable elsewhere. Mark was stunned when he heard it – boy is that a reason never to train anyone. What’s more, there was no acknowledgement of the pain and suffering – and COST – of hundreds if not thousands of presentations every day at any large firm being terribly inefficient, let alone ineffective.

This cast is about one narrow but it seems widely unknown skill involved in developing any presentation: which chart should I use for this slide? We’ve seen too many managers and executives and professionals use charts that prove they’re not aware of how to choose. The right chart makes getting our point across easier. The wrong chart makes getting our point across harder, and can damage the audience’s ability to hear our next point, and potentially undermine the entire presentation.

Here’s how to do it right, for the majority of messages most managers deliver routinely.

1. Never Put Excel Cells Into a PowerPoint Presentation - NEVER
2. Understand The Difference Between Slide Topics and Slide MESSAGES
3. Choose A Pie Chart To Show Parts of a Whole
4. Choose a Bar Chart To Show Rankings
5. Choose a Column or Line Chart To Show Time Comparisons
6. The Acid Test: Can We Understand Without Your Explanation?

  [Play in Popup]

• The Right Chart Shownotes (PDF)
• The Right Chart Slides (PDF)

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