Winning The Room

SECTION 5Developing: Charts, Images, and Layouts

The charts, tables, and imagery you incorporate into your data‐driven presentation and how you organize them within your slides will have a large impact on your audience's perception of your presentation. The charts, tables, and imagery will also illustrate many of the most important messages that you intend to deliver as part of your story. As a result, it is well worth the effort to carefully consider what visuals to use, how to format them, and how to lay them out on your slides. Here are some of the concepts discussed in this section:

• Incorporate a mix of slide layouts to avoid repetitiveness.
• Shun highly technical or complex diagrams.
• Apply consistent formatting to tables and charts.
• Match colors to the context.
• Resist the urge to add advanced features to charts just because you can.

Once you accept the fact that you cannot take raw output from a technical software package and drop it into your presentation, you'll have no choice but to create your own charts, tables, and imagery to communicate the information you want to convey. After committing to creating charts and graphs, it doesn't take much incremental effort to ensure that you create and lay them out properly and in a way that will make your presentation look great while successfully communicating your core messages to the audience.

Tip 65: Use a Mix of Chart Types

Having a consistent look and feel to your presentation is good, but too much repetition can also ...