Jul 27 2009

31 Flavors of PowerPoint – Part I

Is there really only one flavor of PowerPoint? (c)iStockPhoto / RapidEye

Is there really only one flavor of PowerPoint? (c)iStockPhoto / RapidEye

Too often I hear people talk about PowerPoint presentations like there is only one flavor of PowerPoint. If you read popular presentation design books like Presentation Zen or Slide:ology, you’d swear that most people are tasked with keynote presentations like Seth Godin and Steve Jobs are. A more visual approach with less text is definitely a good strategy for keynote presentations. However, let’s be realistic that only about 0.012% of presenters are delivering keynote presentations on a regular basis. Continue reading “31 Flavors of PowerPoint – Part I”

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Jul 11 2009

How Colors Can Make Your PowerPoint Charts More Digestible

Mmmm. It all looks good. Where do I focus? (c) iStockPhoto / Adventure Photo

Mmmm. Fruit salad. It all looks good. But where do I focus? (c) iStockPhoto / Adventure Photo

By default PowerPoint or Excel 2007 will create multicolored pie charts or single-colored bar charts. Unfortunately, these default color combinations can cause charts to communicate less effectively unless they are modified.

In most cases, when you’re using charts in PowerPoint slides you’re trying to highlight a specific data point or a subset of data points:

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