Member Article

Spreadsheet fever

With Dr Simon Raybould, Curved Vision

I often tell clients that a presentation is not a good way of giving members of your audience lots of hard facts and figures to remember. To do that you are better off giving them hardcopy. Presentations work best for giving people the interpretation of those facts and figures - the “intelligence behind the information”. To that end then, you think I’d be pleased to see a graph on a slide - that’s information presented as a pattern that an audience can take in visually and, importantly, instantly.

So why did my heart sink last week when I saw this very thing, recently? Because of the simple mistakes made in a copy/paste from Excel into PowerPoint. There are some very, very simple rules to be followed for graphs on a screen:

• size – as big as you can, please. Fill the slide with your graph;
• line thickness – take the trouble to thicken them up. Pencil thin lines might look good on your screen or on paper but they won’t work when projected;
• background colour – change the grey Excel default in the graph’s display area: at the very least make it pale grey because the default grey doesn’t project well;
• line colour – some colours look great on the screen but are notoriously hard for projectors to handle; bright yellow, turquoise and pink for example; take the time to change them to darker, more robust colours. (By the way, if you’ve got so many lines on the graph you feel you have to use light or pale colours as well as dark ones, then you’ve got too many lines on the page!)
• avoid ducks and golden ducks – these are fun and I’ll talk about them next time in detail
• KISS – shadows and 3D effects might look cool but they don’t make things easier to read for your audience

Rarely do I suggest something is a rule rather than a guideline, but believe me, these come pretty close! As always, comments and questions to me at sme@curved-vision.co.uk

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .