In this lesson, we're going to talk about incorporating charts into our PowerPoint. charts are a wonderful way of summarizing large quantities of numeric data. In our last lesson, we left off talking about the five things about PowerPoint that drive us crazy. These findings could have just been listed in bullet form. But how boring is that? How can we make these findings more visual?
Well, using a chart, of course, but how do we get the chart into PowerPoint, and there are a number of ways we could go about this. The easiest ways to use your clipping tool and clip the chart from the source document or web page and paste it in as a picture into your presentation. However, this approach creates a couple of problems. First, you may be violating copyright, so you'll always have to be mindful of that which requires getting permissions and the like. The second problem is that the font and the text may not fit the format. Adding style of your presentation.
So that's not good either as your audience can quickly identify the simple cut and paste that you've just done. So to get around the first problem, what I'll often do is recreate the chart and reference my source, I can recreate the chart using Excel and copy and paste the chart across as a picture once again, or there's actually a mini version of Excel already built into PowerPoint, which you can use to create your chart by either going to your Insert menu and selecting the chart style or by selecting the chart style when it appears in one of the template layout styles. The problem with both of these approaches is that XML charts are really finicky to format. And often you'll be left with text is too small to be legible and actually ends up de emphasizing the point that we're trying to make. In my mind, there's an even better solution that gives you control Please control over your graph.
And that is to use shapes and recreate it yourself. Now you can lay out the graph on your slide in any way that makes sense to you without the constraints of Excel. Let's put the five boxes in here for each of our annoying traits. Now I've got some percentages, and I'll add some clear text boxes for those. Now I'll vary the length of the text boxes to correspond to the percentages. I'll get a little creative and format the boxes in the text to subliminally support my points.
Did I measure all these boxes? Heck no, I was constrained by the amount of text and the shape. But do you really think anyone noticed that in this situation, precision of measurement was secondary to the points I was trying to raise. This is just a more interesting way of presenting the study findings. Then the bulleted list of texts that we saw earlier. The other advantage of using Using shapes to build my graph is that I can now animate any object on the screen.
Let's see this in presentation mode. So now each thing that annoys us comes up at one at a time, and the graph seemingly builds from the edges. There was a second graph in the introductory presentation right at the end. For this one, I want a little more precision because I wanted to emphasize the numbers. So as you can see, I've added an axis that helps add that degree of precision. But this chart was created using just a bunch of shapes and lines.
In this lesson, we talked about three key ideas. First, finding the right chart to tell a story about your data is extremely effective. Secondly, building charts using shapes gives you the ultimate ability to format and animate your slide. And finally, worry less about the precision and more about the message and less than numbers matter more. That's all for this lesson. So we'll see you next time.
I'm Blair cook.