8 Ideas for Better Slides
By Zach Gemignani
December 26, 2007
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powerpoint
presentations
I recently ran a few training sessions about how to visualize and present complex data. The high point was a series of “extreme slide makeovers” in which I honed the message and cleaned up visuals from existing presentations. Here are some ideas to tame busy, confusing slides.
Simplify your slide master, make room for content. Fancy borders, elaborate fonts, and background images do little to impress your audience. They leave little room for communication, either. For those saddled with frilly corporate slides, you’ll have to take on the Brand Standards Police.
It may help to get quantitative. Consider this PowerPoint standard slide master. Less than 50% of the total slide area (highlighted in green) is available for content.

Say something once, why say it again? The Talking Heads sang: You're talkin' a lot, but you're not sayin' anything / When I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed / Say something once, why say it again?
Wordy slides can be confusing and tedious. The author is using a lot of words—and often lots of qualifiers—in hopes that the core point lies somewhere within. The burden of synthesis is shifted to the audience. That’s not fair.
Make one point per slide. The take-away sentence on your slide should clearly state your point; the data on the slide should support that point. Any information that is tangential to the key concept can be pushed to an appendix or supporting slide.
Redundancies cause unnecessary repetition. I was surprised in my slide makeovers how often I found information that could be consolidated to simplify the slide. Redundancy came in many forms: multiple graphs repeating the same legend, axis labels that are described in a chart title, restating the same point.
Christmas is over, take down the decorations. Clear out clip art, “screenbeans”, and other images used to dress up the slide. Most effects are less “dazzling” than you might think. Eliminate gradients, shadows, 3D effects, and most animations. These design effects were exciting 10 years ago. But if they don’t help you communicate, move on.
On the other hand, consider using full-screen photos as a way to convey a idea or theme, accompanied by few words. Here’s an example from a presentation I gave a few months back:

Reduce chart-junk. Excel and PowerPoint charts come pre-packaged with a heaping helping of chart-junk (“unnecessary or confusing visual elements”). Here are a few things I change in a default column chart: no shaded background, grey gridlines, no chart outline, no y-axis line, no column outlines, turn off auto resize text, change column colors to increase contrast. If you want to save yourself from chart-junk induced carpal tunnel syndrome, check out Chris’ chart cleaner Excel add-in. Sometimes charts aren’t necessary at all. If you’re using a pie or stacked column chart to show a single data point, the number alone will do the job more clearly.

Delete your “Text-junk” too. Text can contain “chart-junk” too—visual distractions in text that dilute your message.
- Title Capitalization or Other Excessive and inconsistent use of Capital Letters. Title caps doesn’t make sense to use and is more difficult to read.
- Underlining. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, use bold or italics.
- Don’t use bullets when there is only one item or sentence. People have become so accustomed to using bullets that they’ll use them when they are totally unnecessary.
- Bad fonts: The worst is Comic Sans MT, as the LMNOP blog describes: “These days, just like an e-mail from an “@ aol.com” address has a distinct lack of credibility, an e-mail written in this font makes the sender seem ridiculous and out of touch.”
Simplify style and formatting. Inconsistent colors, fonts, font sizes, and other styles are a subtle distraction. Limit yourself to three font colors (emphasis!, normal, low-emphasis), three font sizes, and three font styles. Here’s an example.
Three colors

Three sizes

Three font-styles

Putting it all together

All these points can be summed up as: Make everything on your slide serve your story. Best wishes for 2008!
Analytics Roundup: Collaboration and Presentation
By Chris Gemignani
November 19, 2007
Find more about:
BPM
powerpoint
presentations
software
- Death by PowerPoint » SlideShare
- Quick inspiration for great presentations.
- Role Modellers - Home
- Software to manage human collaborative work via a workflow motif. Driven by Human Interaction Management.
Google Presentations and the Right Tool for the Job
By Zach Gemignani
September 24, 2007
Find more about:
business
powerpoint
presentations
productivity
tools
Last week, Google released Presentations to fill out their portfolio of online, collaborative document types (they already offer text documents and spreadsheets). The Google folks were kind enough to include us in a round of beta testing a few weeks back, giving us a chance to preview this application, find bugs, and offer feedback.
If you give Google Presentations a try, you may be struck by its limitations. It doesn't offer much flexibility in creating presentations, especially when compared to Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple Keynote. The best you can do is create simple text slides on a few predefined templates. On the other hand, it offers unique capabilities you don't get with desktop applications. In particular, we were impressed with how easy it was to share a presentation live online.
I have started to wonder whether calling Google Presentations a "web-based competitor to PowerPoint" or "a PowerPoint clone" was simplistic and misguided. Lumping together software tools is a natural reaction to long lists of features and techno-terminology. Software vendors don't make it any easier to distinguish the differences when they attempt to convince us that their solution is the complete, do-everything tool to satisfy all your [presentation/data analysis/communication/networking] needs.
So, we assume our software tools fall into neat buckets. We assume the tool we are using today do everything we need "well enough." And we assume any new tool is a direct competitor to what we use. As a result, we are severely limited in what we can achieve.
For a long time, I was a fan and a heavy user of PowerPoint. It did what I needed. Perhaps I told myself that what it did was all I needed. A while ago, I had to break off this exclusive relationship.
Now, I find myself using a bunch of different tools to communicate information. On the one hand, this has made my life more complicated. There are new applications to learn and the hassle of moving documents around. But in other ways, it's easier. I use tools designed for the task at hand. And I have opened up a whole new realm of what is possible in terms of organization, polish, and audience engagement.
The table below shows the activities involved in business presentations. For each activity, I have a rough assessment of how well PowerPoint, Keynote, and Google Presentation perform. I also list the current Juice toolset.

7 comments | Show all comments only the last 5 are shown
Paul Soldera said:
We've been using Google tools quite a bit recently. They really shine when you need to collaborate remotely, but after that, the functionality really is limited - especially the spreadsheet program. I haven't tried the presentation one, but must give it a go.
The real drawback for me though, is the response time. I am so used to rapid text/data entry and menu response time that I have almost no tolerance of any perceptible delay. I think this is where ajax and other RIA apps hit a wall. Which is a pity.
Dan Keldsen said:
Nice comparison, and like Paul, I've found myself using Google tools a fair amount (why not, they're free - making experimentation so much easier than "enterprise apps").
Lag-time and some inconsistencies across the "product suite" make working with these tools a bit confusing, but using Google Docs and Spreadsheets has been very handy with some remote collaboration lately.
In your comparisons, I agree with most of your commentary, with one exception...
I'm trying to like Numbers, but while it provides beautiful charts and tables for the most part, it's limitations in color schemes, and in a number of frustrating UI interactions, is giving me heartburn. It's quirky, and on my machine (2 month old MacBookPro - the LED variation), is very slow in switching between pages/tables/charts.
Even though it has been nearly 14 years since I last used Illustrator to create charts, I'm about to ready to give it a whirl again - at least the graphical presentation is sure to be solid, although it's baffling to me that all of these tools, whether coming from a spreadsheet or "art" metaphor are still so clunky after all this time.
I guess the "Tufte-ian" revolution hasn't quite intersected with the usability movement yet, eh?
Chris Gemignani said:
I agree that Numbers is a little weird. While the basic charts are pretty good, the inspector-based manipulation is hard to get used to. The good news is an update to Numbers appeared yesterday that is supposed to address performance.
Tony Rose said:
I'm not familiar with Numbers. I will say that I almost snapped my mouse in half trying to use Google Spreadsheets and dealing with the delay. Even the slightest lag between key strokes and data entry won't work for me. Call me high-maintenance... We have a long way to go before Excel is overtaken in the corporate world.
What, no Xcelsius in the "juicebox"?
GleaM said:
I just heard yesterday the name of a web-based suite called Zoho:
http://www.zoho.com/
For what I did heard and the impression that I got from it (looks very google-like), I think it beats Google suite by far.
Just to add somo other solutions...
Regards.
rolo said:
We have set up a 46" LCD to display KPIs, and use powerpoint, but obviously it has not been the best experience.
Can anyone suggest tools for digital signage in corporate offices where a reports and analysis unit has to display, every other day, kpis, tables with data, trendlines, bar charts, etc. But in a professional way and not like a simple power point?.
Thanks in advance!
Noah Iliinsky said:
Hi Zach,
I've got to agree on your choice of the Omni tools; they really are best-of-class.
I'm curious about what you mean when you say storyboarding. Typically, I'd think of frames that define phases, with some illustration and supporting text. How does that work in OmniOutliner?
Best, Noah
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Analytics Roundup: Chicken presentation and so much more
By Ken Hilburn
August 18, 2007
Find more about:
ai
algorithms
blog
business
collaborative-filtering
datamining
excel
graphics
graphs
humor
intelligence
machinelearning
netflix
powerpoint
presentations
squarepie
statistics
trends
typography
usability
userexperience
video
visualization
- Programming Collective Intelligence
- Pulling information from community contributed data.
- Videos that can change your organization
- Top ten business videos on YouTube.
- The Encyclopedia of Business Cliches
- UC Berkeley CS160 User Interfaces Fall 06
- Course readings and student notes.
- Language Log: Chicken: the PowerPoint Presentation
- The presentation you dare not give.
- Prometheus Meets the Enterprise Management System
- I laughed, I cried, I laughed again.
- Diagrams: Tools and Tutorials
- Data Visualization: Modern Approaches
- A grab bag of ideas.
- fontblog : Introducing Ambiguity
- A typographic symbol to indicate ambiguity, compare to the typographic mark lol which indicates stupidity.
- Whimsley: The Netflix Prize: 300 Days Later
- Process Trends Website
- Good excel charting and visualization tips.
- BusinessWeek: Who Participates And What People Are Doing Online
- A simple and fairly effective use of square pies.
Persuasive Presentations
By Zach Gemignani
June 5, 2007
Find more about:
powerpoint
presentation
presentations
Back in my consulting days at Diamond Technology Partners, I was known for my ability to bend PowerPoint to my will and fashion epic presentation-stories from lovingly-crafted slides. There was a term used when a client wanted a good looking presentation; they would ask if it could be "Zachified." Ah, the false glory.
Now I realize I was merely an amateur in designing presentations that could entrance and persuade an audience. I was going on instincts without much thought to the types of evidence, structure, and flow that would convince my audience.
Last week I had lunch with a man who has made a living from teaching others how to create effective presentations. His name is Andrew Abela and his blog is Extreme Presentations. Andrew has developed a thorough framework and training approach. He has a Doctorate and is a professor at Catholic University, so you know he brings an academic seriousness to the messed-up world of flufferpoint:
def (Withrop Hayes): A presentation that attempts to distract from the lack of substantive content or evidence with use of screenbeans, clip art, and other stock pictures or illustrations. A.k.a. clipterfuge (Todd Moy), clusterpoint (Cathy), The Macy’s Data Day Fluff Parade (Jamel).
Andrew gave me a quick backstage pass to his training methodology. Here are a few highlights:
1. Like a fool, I asked whether he preferred the sparse Lessig method or the more traditional, content-rich method. False choice. It all depends on the situation, just don't use the wrong approach at the wrong time. Andrew makes the distinction between "ballroom style" and "conference room style."
"Ballroom style presentations, like most typical PowerPoint presentations, are colorful, vibrant, attention-grabbing, and (sometimes) noisy. They typically take place in a large, dark room, such as a hotel ballroom. Conference room presentations are more understated: they have less color and more details on each page. They are more likely to be on printed handouts than projected slides, and they are more suited to your average corporate conference room. The single biggest mistake that presenters make is to confuse the two idioms, and particularly to use ballroom style where conference room style is more appropriate. I would estimate that upwards of 90 percent of all PowerPoint presentations use ballroom style, yet most of the time our presentation conditions call for conference room style."
That's from an article he shared with us called Achieve Impact through Persuasive Presentation Design (PDF)
2. It is important to mix data-based evidence with anecdotes. People need both of these types of information to persuade both the mind and heart (my interpretation).
3. Anticipate your audience's objections and build them into your storyline. What is better than having exactly the right slide next when someone raises a concern?
4. Good presentations require a lot of thought about their design. Andrew has defined five dimensions of an "Extreme Presentation": logic, rhetoric, graphics, politics, and metrics.
His blog offers a couple useful tools:
- A framework for choosing the right chart
- Slides that pass the squint test : "A good way to test whether your page is laid out properly is to apply what designers call the "squint test." Squint at the page, so that all the text is blurred and illegible. Do you get anything about the page without having to read the text? If you can see that the page is showing a process or two or three alternatives or a bunch of things converging, then your page passes the squint test."
4 comments
Jose Hernandez said:
Hello Zach,
I could not follow the link to the article "Achieve Impact through Persuasive Presentation Design (PDF)", can you please check.
Thanks
Jose
Zach said:
That PDF is now available.
Atilla said:
Hi Zach,
I noticed that the links at the end of your posts do not point to the correct URLs. For example, the NEXT link points to your current post (Persuasive Presentations) instead of "Excel 2007 and the Lie Factor" post, and the Previous link points to your current post (Persuasive Presentations) instead of "How to manipulate..." post. Is there a way to correct this? I have been trying hard to browse your archives but due to this problem, it is not possible.
Cheers
Tom said:
I like #3 a lot... As a college student, my professors are always telling me to do this in my essays, and I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be an effective strategy in a presentation. I'll have to give it a shot sometime soon.
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Earlier writing


7 comments | Show all comments only the last 5 are shown
Ken said:
I go even further:
I use a sans serif font (serifs aren't needed for what should be minimal text);
never sized less than 28 pts (more as a discipline for myself to minimize text);
almost never use articles (except in quotations, which I also edit heavily, using ellipsis); and
almost always use images to "emotionally anchor" (or graphically explain) what I'm trying to convey.
Combined with *sparing* use of appropriate video and audio, I find this approach has been able to keep 100+ college freshmen awake and reasonably attentive for 10 weeks of an 8am course.
Joy said:
Great post! I love seeing the really good presentations that are simple and to-the-point. I was wondering if you have any suggestions for when you are limited by a standard template you have to use as part of company policy.
Zach said:
Joy, I read one presentation guru who argued that it is foolishness to paste the company logo on each and every slide. It isn't as if the audience has forgotten who is giving the presentation two slides in. With that in mind, one idea is to use the standard template for the title page, then go with blank/all white slide masters when you want need more area for content. Likewise, use images that take up the full slide. You are still using the template, it is just getting covered up by your content.
David Gerbino said:
Zach,
I am the brand police and I could not agree with you more. However, in my roll as "the brand police" I did have concessions to make with the powers that be. Having said that, we have opened up our corporate templates to increase screen real estate as compared to what the branding agency created. Over time, the "logo" on every page will shrink and ultimately disappear.
Thank you for this very important piece on presentations. You do Edward Tufte proud.
jlori said:
Great.
Joy said:
Thanks so much Zach and David for great insights! I hope to be able to tell our story without all the brand stuff taking up 20-30% of the slide!
Adrian Cherry said:
Another great post, w.r.t. point 7 please support the cause!
http://bancomicsans.com/about.html
said:
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