One of the kindest favors you can offer your audience in a presentation is a roadmap for their virtual journey. An outline or agenda page is a good start. As you proceed into the presentation, you may want to offer an additional visual mechanism to offer a map of their whereabouts. This is the role of a “tracker." Trackers are a visual device on PowerPoint slides that communicate where in the overall scheme of the presentation the current slide fits. I’ve provided a few examples of trackers below:
A few points to make trackers effective:
Introduce the tracker. Create a slide that describes your analysis framework (e.g. the value chain shown above). Once you have given the audience this explanation, you are free to use a miniature version of the framework visual on future pages.
Highlight. In each of the trackers above, one piece of the visual has been highlighted. The audience can see precisely where they are in the story.
As simple as possible. A tracker can easily end up too complicated to be useful to the audience. At the same time, if there are just a couple of sections to your analysis, a tracker can be overkill.
Avoid distraction. As a matter of preference, I usually place the tracker in the upper right-hand corner of the slide. Wherever you choose to place it, don’t let it distract from the core message of the slide.
