By admin
You can talk numbers until you’re blue in the face, but when you really want to get your audience’s attentionand get your point across in the shortest time possibleyou need a chart.
Sometimes referred to as a graph, a chart is nothing more than a visual representation of a bunch of numbers. The ubiquitous pie chart (Figure 6-1) breaks up a circular area into easy-to-understand, color-coded wedges, each of which represents a numerical quantity. PowerPoint 2007 lets you add punch to your presentations with the same bar charts, line charts, scatter graphs, and so on that PowerPoint 2003 offered. Only now they’re better looking, since Microsoft Excel has replaced PowerPoint 2003’s Microsoft Graph program.
| DESIGN TIME
Go Easy on the Extras |
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This chapter shows you the quickest, most powerful ways to customize your visuals, and the Appendix shows you how to get help with the more arcane customization options PowerPoint offers.
But before you roll up your sleeves and customize every single tiny detail of your charts, diagrams, and tables, consider that the goal of every presentation is the same: to communicate something to an audience. In most cases, your audience couldn’t care less if you beveled your table column headings to point up instead of down, or chose pink over salmon for your diagram’s background. Your audience is after meaning. So always keep these question in mind: Why are you showing them this particular chart or diagram? Why have you chosen to highlight the second row of the table and not the third?
If you’ve presented solid data in the clearest, most dramatic way possible and you have a little time left over, by all means add that bevel effect. Otherwise, save yourself some work (and your audience some eye-rolling) and leave it out.
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By Peter
In the previous post series, we saw that all text slides come in only two options: bullets and sentences. Each of these options is quite different, with separate forms and functions. Keep them distinct.
A bullet is used to express a core idea. It takes the form of a headline. Look at any newspaper and you’ll see that a headline is not a complete sentence. Basic English grammar tells us that a sentence must contain a subject and a verb. Many headlines don’t contain a subject and a verb. Generally, headlines don’t use all the parts of speech that complete sentences contain: articles (the, an, a), conjunctions (and, but, or), and prepositions (of, for, by, through).
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By Peter
Few human activities are done as often as presentations, and as poorly. One recent estimate has it that 30 million presentations using Microsoft PowerPoint slides are made every day. I’m sure that you’ve attended more than a few. How many of them were truly memorable, effective, and persuasive? Probably only a handful.
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By Peter
To make all of the previous happen, we need a guiding principle. That principle is: Less Is More. These words have been attributed to one of the foremost architects and designers of the 20th century, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), the father of the minimalist school. However, Less Is More existed before Mies was born, in Robert Browning’s 1855 poem, “Andrea del Sarto”.
Mies directed the influential Bauhaus School of Design in Germany in the 1930s, and then came to the United States, where he designed such sleek, classic structures as the bronze-and-glass Seagram Building in New York City.
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By Peter
An extension of the Presentation-as-Document Syndrome is what happens to the audience when the screen lights up with a slide filled with dense text and highly detailed tables, charts, and graphs. The focus of the audience immediately, and involuntarily, goes to the graphics, and they start to read. When they start reading, they stop listening. The graphics then become the center of attention and the presenter becomes subordinate to the slide show, serving, at best, as a voice-over narrator and, at worst, as a ventriloquist.
This problem is compounded as the presenter becomes a reader, too. The reading often fails to rise above the level of a verbatim recitation. Reciting the slides verbatim is patronizing to the audience. They think to themselves: “I’m not a child! I can read it myself!” The results are a failure to connect, a failure to communicate, and most likely, a failure to persuade.
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By Peter
Think about a time when you were in the audience at a presentation and the graphics didn’t work. What was the problem? The most common answers I get when I ask my business clients this question include:
- “The graphics were cluttered.”
- “There was too much on the slide.”
- “The slide looked like an eye chart.”
- “The slide was a Data Dump.”
Now flip the lens and take the point of view of an Audience Advocate. What’s the effect on you? It’s another case of the dreaded MEGO syndrome: the same cause and effect as when a story is unloaded on you as a Data Dump.
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By Peter
Because PowerPoint comes complete with a slew of fonts and character sets, you can add all kinds of special characters to your slides without having to have a souped-up keyboard. Mathematical signs, foreign currency symbols, umlauts, schwas, superscripted characters, and happy faces are just some of the special charactersor symbolsat your disposal. If for no other reason than to accent those e’s in résumé, you want to familiarize yourself with inserting special characters.
Here’s how you do so:
- Click in a text box and position your cursor where you want to insert the special character. Select Insert
Text Symbol.
The Symbol dialog box appears (Figure 2-11).
- From the Font drop-down menu, choose a font.
The special characters you see vary depending on the font you choose, not just in appearance but in number.
- From the Subset drop-down menu, choose the type of symbol you’re interested in.
Alternatively, you can scroll through the symbol window to find the symbol you’re looking for.
- Choose the symbol you want to insert, and then click Insert.
PowerPoint inserts the selected symbol.
- Click Close to dismiss the Symbol dialog box.
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Figure 2-11. Not all fonts are created equal. The Webdings and Wingdings dingbat fonts, for example, eschew the business, mathematical, and linguistic (shown here) in favor of vector art: telephones, hearts, buildings, and other stylized drawings you can enlarge to create clean, simple graphics. |
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By Peter
Spelling errors are never a good thing. At best, they can give your audience the impression that you don’t pay attention to details. At worst, they can actually prevent your audience from understanding what you’re talking about. And make no mistake about it: the typo that no one but the former English teacher noticed when it appeared on a hard-copy handout is obvious to everyone when it’s four feet high and splashed across a projector screen.
Note: Spell checkers’ suggestions aren’t always right, and they can miss errors, too. What’s more, studies suggest that some folks actually make more mistakes when they use spell checkers than when they don’t because they rely on the tool instead of their own proofreading skills. A spell checker can be a timesaver, but it’s no substitute for carefully reading through your presentation.
PowerPoint gives you two choices when it comes to spell checking your presentation. You can check as you go, automatically, or wait until you’re finished with your presentation and then run the check manually.
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By Peter
Imagine you’re just putting the finishing touches on your presentation when you decide to check your email. There, in your virtual inbox, you see it: a memo informing you that Marketing just renamed the product you referred to throughout your presentation as “Sunny’s Tomato Juice” to “Sunny’s All-Natural Lycopene Infusion.”
Fixing every occurrence by hand would take you forever, and you’d likely miss a few.
Fortunately, there’s a better way. PowerPoint’s Replace option can find all the occurrences of a particular word or phrase and replace them automatically with the text you specify.
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By Peter
Section 2.2. Reversing an Action (Undo)
| Undo is great for recovering from those slip-of-the-finger goofs everyone makes from time to time. Clicking the Undo button you see in the Quick Access toolbar (Figure 2-5) tells PowerPoint to reverse the last action you told it to take. If you cut some text and then select Undo, for example, PowerPoint puts the cut text back where it was (and removes the cut text from the Clipboard). If you paste some text and then select Undo, then PowerPoint removes the pasted text. If you just prefer pressing keys to using the mouse, you can reverse the last action by pressing Ctrl+Z.
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Figure 2-5. As useful as Undo is, don’t rely on it too much. Out of the box, PowerPoint only keeps track of the last 20 actions you took since the last time you opened your presentation, so you’re out of luck if you want to undo the thing you did 21 keystrokes ago. Another reason not to rely on Undo is that, when you close your presentation, PowerPoint erases all record of the actions you took when the file was open. |
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Note: If you click Undo and then change your mind, you can undo the effects of Undo and reapply your action. To do so, just head to the Quick Access toolbar and click Redo or press Ctrl+Y.
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