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…]