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A simple, 4-step guide to beautifully visualize data in your presentations

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This is a guest post by Yousef “Yoyo” Abu Ghaidah, a PowerPoint ninja who founded Slide Cow, a learning platform for all things PowerPoint, presentations and public speaking. When he’s not designing slides or giving presentations, he’s on another coffee run. You can follow him on Twitter here.

You probably already know that adding illustrations to your presentation content is a great way to communicate your message in a way that is fast, easy and effective. This especially makes sense when data comes into play. After all, data is just a bunch of facts or statistics that are collected together for reference and analysis. So, if you’re designing slides, it’s imperative you find a way to communicate data that makes it easy for your audience to process.

Think about it, would you interpret a table full of meaningless numbers, or a chart that illustrates those numbers in a way that allows you to spot critical patterns and trends instead? I don’t know about you, but I value my time. I don’t want to look at a slide and play Where’s WaldoTM for five minutes when I already know there’s a better way. [Read more…]

Show the current time on your PowerPoint slides

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Let’s say that you’re running a meeting and want to keep everyone on track so that the meeting ends on time. These days, fewer people wear watches. (My son says that if you wear a watch, it’s a sure sign that you’re over 30!) Anyway, it may look impolite to be checking your watch, even if you have one. And you don’t want people at the meeting to have their cellphones out — too much opportunity for them to not be listening to you.

Maybe there’s a clock on the wall. But maybe not. And if there is, it’s behind you. But in front of you is your laptop and it shows the slide. So if you could show the current time, that would be great. And it would help everyone keep on track.

So you add a footnote to the slide that shows the time. Note: It will show the time on your computer.

Watch the short video to see how to set this up and how it works. [Read more…]

Link to a specific PowerPoint 2003, 2007 or 2010 slide from Microsoft Word or Excel

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In another tip, “Hyperlink to a specific slide in another presentation, or specific location in another file,” one of the topics I cover is how to create a hyperlink in PowerPoint that links to a specific location in Word or Excel. I also explain that you can link to a specific slide in another PowerPoint presentation by adding the # symbol, the slide number, a period, a space and the slide’s title.

Here’s an example.

As I note in that earlier tip, hyperlinking to another file is a great way to connect content that exists in more than 1 file. You might want to put a hyperlink in a report created in Word or a spreadsheet created in Excel that sends readers to a specific slide in a PowerPoint presentation.

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Link from Word or Excel to PowerPoint

Suppose you want to link from Word or Excel to Slide 2 in a PowerPoint 2003, 2007 or 2010 presentation. If you try to create such a link, Word and Excel open the presentation in Normal view, not Slide Show view.

But if you create a Slide Show file and link to that, the hyperlink works; it opens the PowerPoint file in slide show view at the desired slide. A Slide Show is just a PowerPoint file that opens in Slide Show view.

Create a Slide Show

To create a Slide Show file, follow these steps:

  1. Choose File (or Application button)> Save As.
  2. From the Save as Type drop-down list, choose PowerPoint Show (*.ppsx or *.pps).
  3. Specify the location at the top of the dialog box. I recommend that the presentation and the Word or Excel file be in the same folder, in case you need to move the files to another computer; then, the link should continue to work.
  4. Click Save.

Add the hyperlink in Word or Excel

Now you’re ready to create the hyperlink in Word or Excel. Here are the steps:

  1. Open the PowerPoint file and note the slide number to which you want to link. If you want to include the slide title in the hyperlink for your reference, note that too. Close the file.
  2. In Word or Excel, add a hyperlink to some text or a shape by selecting it and choosing Insert> Hyperlink.
  3. In the Insert Hyperlink dialog box, click the Existing File or Web Page button.
  4. Navigate to the PowerPoint Show file and select it. You’ll see it in the dialog box’s Address text box. If there are spaces in the file name, you may see %20 in place of the spaces. %20 is HTML code for a space, so just leave it.
  5. At the end of the file name in the Address box, add a # symbol, then the slide number. An example: sample%20makeovers.ppsx#2
  6. If you want to add the slide title, add a period, space and the slide title. Tip: In the PowerPoint file, you can click the Outline tab in the left-hand pane and copy and paste the slide title from there. My link now looks like this: sample%20makeovers.ppsx#2. Tell ‘n’ showSM
  7. Click OK.
  8. Test your hyperlink. PowerPoint should open in Slide Show view to the slide you specified.

Nice, yes?

Thanks to a reader for asking the question in the older tip that lead to this technique. How will you find it useful?