Posts tagged as:

3d chart

The Wow Factor: How to Use Charts to Impress Your Boss

by Jorge

CarnivalYou are in the middle of a presentation and your worst nightmare suddenly comes true: your boss yawns, and for the right reasons too: your presentation is dull, your charts are dull dull dull and you are boring your audience to tears.

The solution? High impact charts that keep your audience glued to the screen.

What Are High Impact Charts?

High impact, professional-looking charts are designed to impress your audience. Hit ‘em right between the eyes and they’ll keep coming back for more! If you want to create successful high impact charts you should make sure they share some or all of these characteristics:

  • Real life-like objects: people love the sense of “concreteness” you can get from a well-rendered 3D chart;
  • Animation: if you really want to grab the attention of your audience, animation is your safest bet. Use it to add suspense or dramatic effects (you can do this easily using PowerPoint);
  • Hyperlinks: add some hyperlinks to your charts and/or PowerPoint presentations (for example, add a link to a pie chart slice to jump to a detail chart); people love this kind of sophistication!
  • Strong colors: your audience uses bright reads and yellows and greens all the time. They are expecting nothing less;
  • Go to the point: the message should be clear and simple. Don’t add irrelevant details or details that suggest a different answer;
  • Don’t-make-me-think charts: all charts your audience may not be familiar with (like scatter plots) are off limits;
  • Don’t overdo: often people don’t know where to stop: a 3D pie chart with a single slice exploded is fine; if you explode them all, that’s just stupid.

What you Shouldn’t Do

You’ll want to appear sophisticated, you should avoid:

  • Office 2003 Charts: 3D charts in Office 2003 (Excel and PowerPoint) are badly rendered and chart defaults are ugly. Use Office 2007 or try to make your charts using a free online tool;
  • Clipart and background images: While it is perfectly acceptable (and recommended) to use clipart and background images to keep the attention of your audience, please make sure they are a) send the right emotional message and b) reveal your good taste; try to find suitable images in Flickr or Istockphoto;
  • 3D line charts: While 3D bar and pie charts look great, the more abstract nature of line charts make them unsuitable for 3D effects. Use drop shadows instead.
  • Too many charts in a single slide: Stick to one single idea and make your chart big enough to make sure it impacts even the farthest person in the room;
  • Don’t be excessively consistent. Establish a pattern and be consistent, but add some randomness to force people to keep paying attention. A good place to try this is slide transition.

This is not Data Visualization

OK, before regular readers unsubscribe en masse after reading this post, let me add some notes:

  • Solid data management and visualization principles result in an understanding of your data that goes much beyond the simple illustration of some random key indicators;
  • Most managers don’t really care about data visualization because of their own low literacy rate;
  • However, merit is defined by them, based on their biased knowledge;
  • If you want to climb the corporate ladder, what you do must be aligned with their merit criteria, and the way you design and present your data is no exception;
  • The more you know about data visualization the more options you have. Your persona will be defined by what you know and choose to show, not because you don’t know any better.

So, if your next presentation includes an exploded, 3D, flying pie chart, make sure ignorance is not the reason behind it.

There is an unmistakable tension between what data visualization experts preach and corporate practices. How can we find the right balance between a “purity” that takes you nowhere and a practice that makes you cringe? Share your thoughts in the comments…

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Spiffy Charts

by Jorge

Regular readers know that English is not my mother language , but are kind enough to forgive me for my many mistakes.

I am always willing to learn. Today, while researching for an upcoming post, I came across an expression  I never heard before: “spiffy charts”. I felt in love with “spiffy charts” the moment I read it. And I read it straight from the horse’s mouth (I mean Microsoft).

If you don’t know how to make a chart and are keen to preserve that blissful ignorance, I highly recommend Microsoft Office Online Training, specially the module Create a professional looking chart (regular readers also know how I love “professional-looking charts“). You’ll learn how to “customize your charts to make them more attractive, memorable, and effective“. This means useless charts.

So, let’s see how to turn a humdrum (this is a new word, too…) chart into a spiffy one. First, to declutter your chart remove grid lines:

Ugly Excel bar charts

As you know, grid lines are useless, specially if you don’t care about the data. I would remove the gray background and the border around the legend. And I’d give the chart a more descriptive title to tell the users what they are seeing, but that’s my personal taste.

Then you should remove the y-axis and add labels to each column, further “decluttering” the chart. At this point the readers start sighing for a nicely designed chart table.

Ugly Excel bar charts

Want to give your chart a little more “flair” and make them more “professional-looking”? Just add a gradient fill and a subtle shadow:

Ugly Excel bar charts

Now comes the spiffy part. Imagine that you have a 3D column chart with two series, and one obscures the other. What do you do? No, you can’t remove the stupid 3D effect (remember: you want to make t spiffy chart, not a humdrum one). Well, all you have to do is to change the order of the series:

Ugly Excel 3D bar charts

Much better now, don’t you think? They accept that 3D charts “can be more attractive, but sometimes more difficult to read accurately” (surprise, surprise!). Apparently that’s a detail in the grand scheme of things. You are excused from making accurate charts if you are making professional-looking ones.

So, what else can you do to improve your chart? Ah, yes: the y-axis in a humdrum column chart always starts at zero. We don’t want that, do we?

Ugly Excel bar charts

Now you know how to make inaccurate, professional-looking, spiffy-with-a-flair marmalade charts. Please go straight to the kitchen, make some real marmalade and forget all you’ve learned about data visualization in the Microsoft Office Online Training.

(This is not a real Microsoft Office Training site, is it? It must be some kind of spoof site, and I fell for that trick. Right? Right?)

Sigh…

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