Posts Tagged ‘ presenting numbers ’

Presenting Charts

Recently I have been working with a doctor on preparing a presentation where there is a lot of medical data. The problem is that the presenter has only five minutes to make the presentation and will then be allowed to answer question for 3 minutes.

When we present data in a presentation the temptation is to load as much information as possible into the chart, but when we do this we are running the risk of overloading our audience’s brain with too much information. And the information we really want our audience to see and learn is lost in a chart full of unecessary information.

Below is an example of such a chart:

Screen shot 2010-05-20 at 09.30.09.png

On this chart we have a lot of information that really is not necessary. In this example, the presenter wants to highlight the yellow and orange columns. Other information the presenter wants the audience to see is the authors names and the dates. The four columns at the end of the table is not referred to in the presentation.

The problem here is that the final four columns are distractions. They are not relevant to the presentation or to the point the presenter is making.

My advice in this situation is to remove them. While your boss may not like this, it is more important to allow your slide to ‘breath’ and to give your audience the chance to focus on the information that is relevant. While I personally think that the “author” and the “period” is also not relevant, as these are not referred to by the presenter, this slide can be improved by removing the final four slides:

Screen shot 2010-05-20 at 09.29.27.png

Now the slide looks much less cluttered and messy. The audience has a chance to actually focus on the relevant information, and the presenter is now showing essentially the important information only.

If I were given the opportunity to prepare this slide, here’s how I would present it:

Screen shot 2010-05-20 at 09.52.22.png

Now, only the information I talk about is presented on the slide. There is nothing to distract my audience and the information is presented in a clear and concise way.

When we prepare presentation slides, it is very tempting to overload out charts with data. However, we must think about our audience, and so only putting in the information that is relevant allows us to focus our audience’s attention on that information and nothing else. If we want to give more detail, then this is where a handout can be useful. Our audience members can then study the data in more detail after our presentation. This is particularly important when we have a very short time to give our presentation.

So, please think about your audience, put yourself in their shoes when you prepare your slides and ask yourself if all the data in your slide is really relevant. If it is not, remove it.

2010
05/20
POSTED BY
Carl
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Talking Numbers

One of most badly delivered parts in a presentation is numbers. Quite often when someone is delivering a presentation andaregivingtheir audience a set of numbers whether it is sales figures, production costs or any kind of statistic they just create a chart or graph in Powerpoint or Keynote with just the numbers on it.

What this is to an audience is a group of numbers arranged on a chart. It has no real meaning.

In their book Made to Stick Chip and Dan Heath talk about giving those numbers meaning. here is a great example from that book.

“Bottled water costs about 8.4 cents per ounce. Municipal water in San Francisco costs about 0.0022 cents per ounce. When you read those two statistics, what you take away is this: Wow, there’s a big difference there. Bottled water costs a lot more than municipal water! But our brains aren’t very good at intuiting much more than that…”

However, they go on to give an example how the same example about municipal water and bottled water compare in price.

“The writer Charles Fishman, in a magazine article about the bottled water industry, figured out a brilliant way to make this statistic come alive. Here’s what he wrote: “In San Francisco, the municipal water comes from inside Yosemite National Park. It’s so good the EPA doesn’t require San Francisco to filter it. If you bought and drank a bottle of Evian, you could refill that bottle once a day for 10 years, 5 months, and 21 days with San Francisco tap water before that water would cost $1.35.” Now your brain can begin to apprehend the full scale of the difference between these numbers—it’s not a big difference, it’s a gargantuan difference! It’s a 10-and-a-half-year’s-worth-of-refilling-a- water-bottle difference.”

What you need to do is give some meaning to your numbers, rather than just stating a list of numbers.

Here is another example of  great way to show statistics by the great Hans Rosling. This guy has an awesome way to present numbers and data.

The above video is available in 7 different languages at the TED.com website

There is a simple trick in English that you can use :

“We have now sold over 500,000 units of piping since we started in 2007. That means if we put all those 500,000 pipes end to end it would stretch from Seoul to Pusan and back! That’s about 500 km.”

All we have to do is present the statistic or number and then relate something that your audience can relate to. For example, if your audience has just come back from a coffee break and you are giving statistics on the amount of gasoline used in an average car per year, you could compare the number with the number of cappuccinos Starbucks sell.

So, change the way you present numbers and see your audiences eyes light up.

2010
01/06
POSTED BY
Carl
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