I’m a frequent reader of your blog and owner of you dashboard tutorial. I recently discovered a excel add-on called think cell from a collegue that works in the same company (but in Germany).

It really speeds up the setting and maintainance of charts in the business environment, and it follows good data visualization principles.

I wanted to know what are you thoughts about this tool since I google this to find reviews from the experts and can’t find it from nobody.

Cheers,
Ricardo.

Spot on. Although for me obvious data with obvious analysis is the real killer. If the chart tells you something surprising about your business, no one’s going to care what colour it is, they’re all going to listen. First, really understand understand your data, then present the interesting bits.

I think we need to always show our stuff effectively with the best possible dv practices, i.e. the purest approach (which does not necessarily mean unattractive). In a presentation, we’re trying to sell the outcome of the project. If that’s done well, we will subtly and simultaneously have sold ourselves. It may never result in a rise up the corporate ladder as such, but we will gained respect and a reputation that will have people calling upon us for the challenging jobs that no one else seems to able to deliver on.

Boring presentations are often those that we’re not interested in (wrong audience), too much detail (use a handout) or the presenter reading the slides for me.

wd

Cheers,
Andy
MSFT Office Outreach

Well, there is some satire behind the links: most of them point to posts that say exactly the opposite…

Despite talking about a lot of visualization techniques, I have come to a point where I very rarely use a chart in a presentation. In fact, I have gone ahead and junked our internal ppt templates and started making ppts without any background and just few images. I use big bold text and leave nothing else on the slides. So there is really nothing on the slideshow that my bosses or customers want to stare at. Instead I get the attention by,

> starting with a joke (it works!)
> using the white board when the story becomes intense
> dramatic and realistic clip art (real images from Office Online Clipart gallery)
> talking, singing, moving alot,
> looking in the eye and inviting conflict, or debate or discussion
> tell more jokes when things are hot

But I agree that not every one tells the same story or has similar job. For eg. if you have to present the findings of a merger evaluation, you are bound to have lots of numbers. But in most cases, the audience too will have the caliber to understand and not yawn at such information.

Thanks for the post