Five Ways to Fix Text-Heavy Slides Using Graphics
According to a study from Think Outside The Slide™, audiences find that text-heavy slides are the root cause behind most awful PowerPoint® presentations:
When asked to select the top three things that annoy them about bad PowerPoint® presentations, the respondents cited the following as the most annoying:
- The speaker read the slides to us - 67.4%
- Full sentences instead of bullet points - 45.4%
- Text so small I couldn't read it - 45.0%
All of three of these annoyances all have one root cause: too much text on the slides.
Fixing Text-Heavy Slides with Graphics
A picture is worth a thousand words, so why not use some pictures to cut down on that heavy text?
Here are five ways you can fix text-heavy slides using graphics:
1. Express Regional Information with Maps
If you’re describing a regional sales process, why not replace those bullets with a map? Maps are ideal for presentations because:
- They’re familiar
- They’re easy to digest
- They provide a great summary of the information that you’re presenting
- And they’re easy to remember!
Maps are an obvious, easy substitute for text – there’s no reason to bore your audience with two slides riddled with bullets when you can make the same point using a map.
We’ve written about other various ways to utilize maps before; Laurence even put together an interactive electoral map for the U.S. primary elections.
2. Don’t Describe Processes, Show Them
Too many presenters describe their business processes or procedures with bullet after bullet after bullet; a flowchart will accomplish the same goal, informing the audience on how a particular process works, but it will do it that doesn’t put the audience to sleep.
Written descriptions of process, i.e. loads of bulleted lists, only describe processes – they don’t visualize them! The PowerPoint® itself shouldn’t even try to describe how any of your processes work, that’s something you should be doing as a presenter! Why would you want to bore your audience by reading a slide to them describing how your process works?!
Use a flowchart as a visual aid instead – you can describe your process verbally to your audience while giving them a visual to help clarify how the described process works.
3. Need to Explain an Organization’s Structure? Save Yourself the Trouble
Speaking from experience, it’s pretty tough to explain a complex organization without a visual aid. Written descriptions rarely help, and in the case of PowerPoint® presentations they are actually counter-productive.
Org Charts are easy to build, easy to explain, and don’t pose any “data dumping” problems for most presentations. What I like best about using them in presentations is that they are mostly self-explanatory – it doesn’t take much time at all to make your point regarding a specific person or position within a company when you can instantly illustrate exactly where that position rests within the organization.
4. Illustrate Statistical and Financial Trends with a Chart
Bullets are fine for demonstrating one or two specific figures but when you want to explain a trends or relative values to your audience then the easiest way to do that is to use a chart as a visual aid. Charts are simple and are very good at demonstrating significance, deviation, and relative values.
Many people often avoid using charts in their PowerPoint® presentations simply because it’s difficult to build a free-form chart in Excel®, or because they can’t get their data-driven charts to look right in Excel®, or because the Office Charts® simply suck.
SmartDraw actually makes it pretty easy to build slick, free-form charts and we’ll demonstrate that in an upcoming screencast, but rest assured that the payoff for using a chart in your presentation is well-worth it. Charts get the point across quickly and memorably.
5. Use Prototypes for Explaining GUI Designs
If you’re trying to present a new Graphical User Interface, like a new website layout, then isn’t it insane to present something graphical using nothing but words? Use a simple UI mock-up or a prototype to support your explanation for specific design changes.
There are probably thousands of other ways to eliminate dense blocks of text from your PowerPoint® presentations, but I have personally found these five techniques to be helpful in my work here at SmartDraw and in my spare time as a freelance software developer. Feel free to leave some feedback in the comments below.
Also, if you want to learn how to incorporate SmartDraw diagrams into PowerPoint® presentations and Word® documents then click here.
