295 Getting Your Visuals Right – Part Two

<p>Here we are back with Part Two of the fascinating journey exploring how to use visuals when presenting.</p> <p>Given how straightforward this is, you wonder how come so many people make a mess of it. Let's keep going with some guidelines to help us stand out in the crowd, as the special few, who are professional and know what they are doing.</p> <p>Graphs are great. They make it visually easy to compare items. For certain very heavy numbers focused presentations, you want to compare different variables using bars. Line charts are also clear, quick to understand, and show change over time. When you want to compare two or three items over time, it is very easy to see this one is up and that one is down, and these are flat. Try to avoid more than three lines though, because it gets very confusing very quickly. Simplicity rules when dealing with numbers. Pie charts are also fantastic for showing the parts of a whole. What is the share or the ratio of something? As long as there are not too many slivers, then a pie chart works well. When you have too many slices of the pie, it gets very hard to fathom the relativities between items. For that task, bar charts or line graphs are better.</p> <p>People still manage to get this wrong. The real key is to only show one big graph per slide, if possible, or two graphs if a comparison is needed. As soon as we put up more information on the slide, then the information becomes very small, and the mind is assaulted by too much data at one time. Keep it minimalist and clear.</p> <p>With lighting, be very careful when the room gets set up. Getting there early is the rule. Honestly, I am yet to meet any people who set up the rooms who are also do presenting themselves. They are just told by their boss, "you set up the room, put the chairs here, and put a desk there, put the mic there". Particularly at hotels, I noticed that a lot of times hotel staff very unhelpfully will turn off all the lights in the room. The whole stage is black, and the screen is the main light source. No.No.