POWERPOINT FIRST AID: A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS

In many presentations, a thousand words is what it feels like as slide after bullet point-laden slide goes by. When I teach and consult on how to use PowerPoint effectively, I always encourage people to ditch the bullet points wherever feasible and replace them with visual images... graphs, charts, pictures.

I recently came across a couple of very cool tools that help with this.

WORDLE

Wordle produces word "clouds" from text you provide, giving greater prominence to words that are used more frequently. You can manipulate fonts, layouts and colors to achieve customized outputs.

Wordle is the brainchild of Jonathan Feinberg, a senior software engineer at an IBM research lab. Offered under a Creative Commons Attribution license, it's available to anyone to use, at no cost.

This technique could be used to graphically display a particular theme in a presentation or to make a point about (for example) the content of a marketing brochure, customer service letter or the CEO's speech.

MANY EYES

From another research lab at IBM comes Many Eyes, a project to "create information visualizations that help people collectively make sense of data." At this site, you can upload your data and then choose from a large selection of graphic representations to display the data. Types of visualizations include: bar charts, line graphs, maps, bubble charts, pie charts, treemaps, scatterplots and more.

STRETCH YOUR IMAGINATION

Beyond providing you with some awesome graphic images for your next presentation, these two tools help you stretch your imagination to consider the endless possibilities of information display and which technique will best crystallize your message for your audience.

Comments

[Senior First Aid Certificate]

Thanks for the advice! I personally think Powerpoint presentations are much better with visual aids as well, but I’m not very fond of graphs because they can be complicated and difficult to understand at times. I usually opt for visually engaging and related images and strategically placed text instead.

[Software Developer]

yes,, power point is beneficial for our presentation without it our presentation is useless.. thanks for inform.. keep it up..

[Kathy Reiffenstein]

Hi,

Thanks for stopping by!

You are so right...the relevance of the images/pictures is critical. Irrelevant or unconnected images confuse the audience and are distracting.

I suggest to my clients that they critically assess each slide and ask if, and more importantly, how that slide furthers the audience's understanding of the message.

Kathy

[bespoke software development]

Cool,
Pictures are definatley worth a thousand words but you cant ever be sure that they will be relvant...
Thanks for writing about it