Charts created using Excel can be a great way to tell your story in a PowerPoint presentation. The caveat to Excel charts is that in their rawest form they were created primarily for print and not for effective visual presentation to a large audience. This requires presenters to tweak the format of the chart before inserting it into PowerPoint to make it visually more attractive and even more importantly to communicate the message they are trying to get across.
The main questions I like to ask when creating a chart are the following:
- What am I trying to communicate - trends, comparisons, an anomaly, etc.
- How can I simplify the chart and increase the impact of the message
I won't spend as much time on the first of these questions in this posting, but rather would like to focus on the second one, especially as it relates to bar, line or column charts in Excel. The guidelines below apply to all of these:
- Drop the gridlines
How: Right click on the grid lines, clear
- Clear the plot area
How: Right click plot area, clear
- Drop the axis value
How: Right click on the numeric axis, clear
- Use the item value
How: right click on bar, format data series, value
- Get rid of the border on your legends and consider if legends are needed
How: Select format legend, border none
- Consider an image or photograph for your fill on a bar chart when appropriate
How: select the bar, format data series, patterns, fill effects, picture and browse to the image you want to use
- Resize your point size to increase legibility
How: format data labels, font, select font size, italic/bold
A sample bar chart is available for your reference: Download excel_chart_example.xls (Excel Chart:311KB)
