Month: March 2020

Take your PowerPoint skills to the next level!

By Lindsay Lamb

Looking for something to take your mind off of the corona virus? Wanting to brush up your skills in presenting data? Our office is going to strive to offer you fun blog posts to increase your knowledge and skills in data visualizations, data analysis, and SEL evaluation techniques. Read below for our current tip!

Ever been faced with creating a PowerPoint but felt stymied by fear (How do I get started? How do I make something look cool? What are my key points?)? Or do you just have writers block when it comes to presentations in general? I get it! I went to an Edward Tufte course wherein he spent a good chunk of time hammering home the message that PowerPoints are terrible and have dumbed us down! However, we live in a world of PowerPoint, so how can we make them work?

His advice, and my advice to you: keep them simple. Make the meat of your slides limited to things like data visualizations, images, movies, and icons. Limit the words on each slide (his recommendation is to use NO words).

This is all well and good, but sometimes, it is hard to even get started or know what to do.

A few weeks ago, my colleague Andrea contacted me to help save a PowerPoint presentation other colleague worked on and would be presented in just a few hours. She said it needed some help to make it pop, to be trimmed down, icons and other data visualizations. I had just two hours to help her out. I held my breath and waited to hear my email ding announcing the arrival of the presentation.

Ding!

I opened it up and read… and read, and read, and read. Slides were plain or had walls and walls of text.

The default powerpoint title slide doesn’t make your audience excited to hear your content.

Look at this slide.

Walls o’text are NOT a best practice.

First off, how do you feel when you see this? I felt a tightness in my chest. How was I going to fix this??? How would you fix this? Can you read anything? What are the key take-aways?

I felt the fear and writers block kick in. I took a breath, checked the time, and got to work!

My first step, something I learned from my graduate school advisor, was to start at the beginning and make the structure of the presentation look professional. I quickly found a photo relevant to the study and made it the title slide. I found logos for each school highlighted in the presentation. I even used the Design Ideas feature in PowerPoint. I added our business logos. I started to feel better. It felt official. It felt real. It felt comforting. I could do this!

Transforming the title slide by adding an image professionalizes your presentation right from the start

I then started working through the rest of the presentation. I used the Design Ideas feature when it helped tell the story. What were the key points? If I was listening to this presentation, what did I need to know? In a way, it was helpful that I had not written the first draft because I was able to read through the existing slides, find the story, and trim it down. There was a pattern. I could do this.

I found icons available through PowerPoint and the nounproject.com (check them out if you haven’t done so already! They have an icon for just about everything!). I created a template and used the same icon for similar themes so participants could anticipate information. Remembering what I learned in a training provided by Stephanie Evergreen while I worked for the Austin Independent School District’s Department of Research and Evaluation, I made sure to add white space. We are visual learners, and adding white space helps us see the main points more clearly. I cut, and then cut some more.

Adding color and breaking up the text was extremely helpful

I looked at the clock.

I chugged away.

That wall o’text is now an attractive list.

I couldn’t get to everything I wanted to, but I distilled the information, made a template for how to present the information (e.g., consistent colors, layout, font), added informative icons to trigger what information was coming, and made more white space to draw readers in. I followed advice from Tufte and Evergreen as best I could and sent my slides to Andrea.

Within seconds I got a phone call, “ This is AMAZING!!!”

Andrea then shared slides with our other colleague who said, “OH MY GOD, WHERE DID THIS GIRL COME FROM?!?! WOW. ”

So, my friends, you can do this too, I know you can! Remember these general rules, and they will take you far:

Powerpoint Best Practices

1) Keep your slides simple – less is more! No paragraphs if possible (put text in the notes if needed)

2) Use consistent branding and color schemes, and don’t use PowerPoint’s default of blue/orange if possible

3) Remember that PowerPoint is a visual medium. Increase the use of images, icons, graphs, and other data visualizations.

4) Decrease the number of words on each slide (add white space!). Some of the slides above could have been further augmented by moving each point to its own slide.

As a golden rule, TELL your audience key points with your voice, and SHOW them key take-aways in the slides; the two go hand-in-hand.

Good luck!

Covid-19 & Pie Chart Best Practices

by Andrea Hutson

You don’t need to search very hard on the web to find people that cannot stand pie charts. In fact, one of the first posts I found when searching for the topic was The Five Stages of Grief Over The Death of Pie Charts.

(Great read, by the way.)

But I think, as with many hated data visualizations, pie charts have their place, and today I’d like to share some things I’ve learned using Covid-19 as a timely example. (If you’re reading this way in the future, Covid-19 or Coronavirus was a nasty lung-infecting virus that swept the world in 2020, devastating countries and entire economies.)

I’m going to give a few examples of best practices for making pie charts useful. Much of what I’ve learned came from Ann Emery’s amazing course, Great Graphs. At publication time, Great Graphs wasn’t open, but I highly recommend following Ann and trying out her other courses. She’s at Depict Data Studio.

Do’s and Don’ts for Pie Charts

Don’t: Use too many categories.

Top 10 Countries with Most Confirmed Cases as of March 8, 2020

Bad pie chart example: too many categories. Shows a pie chart with 11 categories, the vast majority of which are too tiny to see.
This is sourced from a real pie chart, and I’m assuming the author is normally a great data visualizer who is too stressed and overwhelmed to use best practices at the moment.

This one is a rainbow of awful. What’s wrong with this chart? Several things, but the most important is that it has far too many categories. There are 11 in total, and all but the top 5 are almost impossible to see. Go ahead, try to locate Switzerland.

I’ll wait.

This chart forces you to use the legend to understand what’s going on, and in the end, the legend becomes the only thing that actually gives you relevant information. So what’s the point of a pie chart here? I would recommend converting this instead to a bar chart if you want all of the information. But first think – do my readers need all this information? Why am I presenting data about 10 countries instead of 7, 11, or 200?

If you can lower the number of categories, I give you full permission to If use a pie chart.

Do: Keep the number of categories to 5 or fewer

Top 10 Countries with Most Confirmed Cases as of March 8, 2020

A streamlined pie chart with just 5 clear categories. This chart shows that Mainland China has the most cases with 74%, and that the other countries are about equal, with Italy, South Korea, Iran, and all other coutntries having 6-7% each.
This pie chart only has 5 categories and gives the message much better — Mainland China has the vast majority of cases, and Italy, South Korea, Iran and all other countries split the remaining 26% almost equally.

This is the same data, but with the number of categories kept to 5. Now we can actually interpret the pie chart itself, without relying on the legend.

Honestly, 3 or 4 categories is ideal. Keep in mind that if some of your categories are really tiny, unless that is a fundamental part of your message, it is likely better to use another type of visualization.

Do: Include the percentages and labels inside or next to your pie chart

Second, include your percentages and your data labels IN the pie chart. Ditch the legend. A good rule of thumb: if, in the end, you need a legend to interpret your pie chart, consider using another form of data visualization.

Do: Let the title tell the story

This is a point I try to make with every graph, and it’s so important. When you make a data visualization, you are telling your reader a (hopefully compelling) visual story. You are editing what you show to make a point. Why not explain the point so that readers don’t have to figure it out (or misinterpret the findings?)

The Vast Majority of COVID-19 Cases in the US are from an Unknown Origin

Exploding pie chart showing that the vast majority of COVID-19 infections are from an unknown source (89%).
Source: CDC, March 18, 2020

The pie chart above is pretty clear on its story, but having the title spells it out for the reader. Sometimes the mere act of typing the title will also help you to make your graph more clear to make sure the message is consistent.

Do: Get creative

I used an exploding pie chart in the above visualization. Data visualization experts will tell you that you should never use exploding pie charts, but don’t listen to those spoilsports. I used one here because I tend to think of viruses and the immune system as a Pac Man-type system. I think it works. Anything you can do to keep your reader interested is always a good idea.

(By the way, it is absolutely maddening that as of time of publication, it’s almost impossible to get tested for the virus in Central Texas and other places in the U.S. unless you have been to a place with a high rate of outbreak or have had close contact with a confirmed case. As you can see, this practice makes no sense whatsoever.)

In conclusion: don’t be afraid of pie charts, but don’t make terrible pie charts either. With just a few easy rules of thumb, you can make great ones. Want to learn how? Contact me to enroll in my 2-hour in-person class, Telling Stories With Data , where I walk you through the principles of good graph design in EXCEL. Or take Ann Emery’s course when it’s available. It’s fabulous.

Quick fix: Add Icons to a bullet list.

Adding icons to your reports not only looks better, but actually helps your readers retain information. I learned about this easy fix from Ann Emery’s amazing class “Great Graphs”, which I highly recommend (more at the end of the post).   

Sometimes ‘serious’ evaluators or researchers brush off these techniques as being too warm and fuzzy, and feel it is more professional to present everything like a journal article. I feel that these techniques can actually make your presentations look MORE professional, in addition to ensuring that people actually read your report.

Imagine a quick summary box like this one. Adding text boxes like this one can help break up your reports and draw the reader to the important conclusions. Still, as is, it’s a wall o’text:

First thing: break this into bullet points. Bullets are much easier to read and give the user immediate information — you can quickly see there are three major points. 

Now, we’ll add some icons. But first, we need to get rid of those bullet points we just so carefully added.  We’ll keep the spacing the same, but make the bullet points invisible, so they won’t interfere with the graphics. 

I’m assuming you’re writing this report in Microsoft Word—so here’s what to do:

  1. Highlight your bullets, right click, and go to “Bullets and Numbering”.
  2. Click “Customize…”
  3. Click “Font…”
  4. Under “Effects”, click “Hidden” 

Now your box should look like this:

Let’s replace that empty space with icons!

  1. Go to Insert->Icons
  2. Scroll through the icons or search for something specific (see examples below!)
The icon dialogue box in Microsoft Word (Mac)
  1. Choose 3 icons that go with the above message and insert.
  2. Choose each icon, right click, and go to “Wrap Text”; choose either “Square” or “In Front of Text” – this will help keep your formatting in line.
  3. Now, move to the text, and voila!
The icons really make this section pop, and it looks more professional, and less like this report was made in MS word..

Check out Ann at Depict Data Studio. At time of publication, her Great Graphs course was not open, but she’s got other options.