{"id":1138,"date":"2011-10-17T10:52:58","date_gmt":"2011-10-17T09:52:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elementally.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/?p=1138"},"modified":"2011-10-17T10:52:58","modified_gmt":"2011-10-17T09:52:58","slug":"presentations-with-graphs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/presentations-with-graphs\/","title":{"rendered":"Presentations with graphs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Rant mode on.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not rocket science folks &#8211; seriously.\u00c2\u00a0 I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve just had to sit through a 30 minute presentation (promised duration, 15 minutes!) that had the worst slides I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve seen in a long time.<\/p>\n<p>What was wrong?<\/p>\n<p>Well, what wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t bullet-points was graphs. There are places for bullet-points, I know (forgive me, I used a bullet-point slide for this presentation! Just one, honestly!) and there are places for graphs&#8230; but&#8230; but I need to be able to read them.<\/p>\n<p>Just because it looks pretty on your screen using Microsoft Excel (or Mac Numbers or OpenOffice Calc) does <strong>not<\/strong> mean it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s going to work when it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s projected.<\/p>\n<p>Sort it out, for goodness\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 sake!<\/p>\n<p><strong>Rant mode off.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Well, now that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got that out of my system, let me look at what was wrong and how to deal with it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Text too small<\/strong> &#8211; just make it bigger, how hard can that be?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Lines too thin<\/strong> &#8211; you can probably read a line on a graph that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s only two pixels wide on your computer screen but when it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s up on a wall 30 feet away two pixels doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t work. Your mileage may vary but I find that a minimum of nine or ten pixels is as thin as I can ever go. 15 is better.<\/p>\n<p>If you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got enough information on your graph to mean that you can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t show everything you want to show with lines 15 pixels wide&#8230; well frankly you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got too much information on your graph.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Silly coloured lines<\/strong> &#8211; there are decent psychological reasons for using yellow sometimes but they have to be subservient to the practicalities of things like, brutally, whether your audience can see yellow lines.<\/p>\n<p>A combination of a projector that doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t show yellow as well as a computer screen and ambient lighting (which is generally biased towards yellow) means that a whole third of the information the presenter was talking about on his line-chart was invisible to the audience&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Both of those problems stemmed from the same source &#8211; specifically, line-graphs from Excel (Microsoft\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s spreadsheet product) had been transplanted to PowerPoint with no thought about the fact that they were different media. Frankly that makes about as much sense as transplanting a kidney without thinking about whether the host body will reject it.<\/p>\n<p>Without all kinds of immuno-suppressant treatments of course it will.<\/p>\n<p>Transplanting isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t an act, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a process &#8211; and so it is with moving stuff from one piece of software to another &#8211; just because you <strong>can<\/strong> copy\/paste doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t mean you can <strong>just<\/strong> copy\/paste!<\/p>\n<p>And yet the solution isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t difficult &#8211; just remember that the receiving software\/hardware (Powerpoint and a data projector usually) are different from the donor body.\u00c2\u00a0 Think of getting some pre-and post operative care!<\/p>\n<p>What does this mean in practice?<\/p>\n<p>Some tips here might be useful &#8211; don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t take them as a comprehensive list, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re just what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s at the front of my mind right now.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Thicken your lines before transplant &#8211; and test with a projector once you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re done<\/li>\n<li>Take out text such as axis labels before you transplant &#8211; it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s usually much easier to put this in (legibly!) as text boxes etc once the transplant is complete<\/li>\n<li>Take out the legend &#8211; create a customised legend in a text box or similar once transplant is complete.\u00c2\u00a0 Or better yet, consider this&#8230; if your graph is so complicated as to need a legend, might it not be too complex to project?<\/li>\n<li>Test out reversing your colour scheme &#8211; projecting lines etc onto a black background is often more effective, depending on your surroundings<\/li>\n<li>Check your colour-scheme works <strong>when<\/strong> <strong>projected<\/strong>, not just glowing on your computer screen<\/li>\n<li>Think about whether you want all your information to arrive at once &#8211; it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s often much easier for an audience to absorb information step by step. You can explain one line before another appears, so that everyone fully understands what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s going on<\/li>\n<li>Be sure you need a graph in the first place &#8211; a piechart of percentage male\/female just makes you look stupid, not sophisticated!<\/li>\n<li>Mike it bigger &#8211; I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve never yet seen a slide that was legible which had a graph in only part of the screen.\u00c2\u00a0 Size matters, guys!<\/li>\n<li>Flag it up &#8211; an audience that is expecting data displayed visually is much, much better placed to absorb it. A good plan is to have a blank slide while you explain the data before showing your audience the graph.\u00c2\u00a0 Once the graph is showing, no one listens to your explanation of how it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s based on estimates <strong>only<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>Lean the basic rules of designing graphs &#8211; for example, solid lines for historical data and dashed lines for future projections so that your audience understands that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not 100% reliable<\/li>\n<li>See previous rule.\u00c2\u00a0 If you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve not done that, stop wasting your time reading this and go back to GCSE maths! :)<\/li>\n<li>KISS &#8211; three-dimensional vertical lines in histograms might look pretty but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just confusing&#8230; is your audience supposed to be thinking of the height of the graph, the surface area of the line or the volume of the stack?<\/li>\n<li>Check the psychology of your colour-scheme and check it for things like colour blindness.\u00c2\u00a0 Red means danger in the west and green means good things &#8211; is that what you want to say to your audience&#8230;? And what about those people who see two grey\/brown lines instead of a red one and a green one?<\/li>\n<li>Signpost &#8211; for all the weaknesses of text-orientated slidedecks, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s often implicit in them that they tell the audience not only the facts, but where those facts fit in to the bigger picture. There are titles and headlines and a clear (if boring) structure. The temptation when you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re using a number of slides which are orientated around graphs is that the audience lose where they are within the bigger picture of the presentation. Without context without being reminded about \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcwhy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 the figures on the graphs are important, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re just pretty (sometimes) pictures&#8230; and will barely be glanced at, let alone interpreted or remembered. You mileage my vary, but I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d suggest that three graphs in a row is the absolute maximum<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Quite a few of these are straight-forward &#8211; others may require a blog entry of their own and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll get around to that when I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got time (hey, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m a busy man!) &#8211; so it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s perhaps worth taking a look at any slides you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got lie-ing around and seeing how any graphs on them stack up (if you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll pardon the pun!).<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rant mode on. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not rocket science folks &#8211; seriously.\u00c2\u00a0 I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve just had to sit through a 30 minute presentation (promised duration, 15 minutes!) that had the worst slides I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve seen in a long time. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-presentation-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1138\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}