Pictures speak louder than words, and so I will almost always recommend replacing text with imagery or graphics. But it is possible to make your text communicate more like a graphic, imparting much more information than just the definitions of the words themselves.
One way is by using a Word Cloud. You’ve probably seen these on the internet or in print to analyze the content of a State of the Union speech, for example (how many times was the word “Freedom” used…) But I’ve been playing around with word clouds lately, and one of my new favorite uses for them is to present a list of information.
Let’s say you were presenting a list of movies about con artists. Your slide might look like this…
Even if this list were numbered, it would still be on the less than exciting side and hard to digest as every entry has the same weight and general importance. Now, let’s use a word cloud instead (and ditch the less than essential headline too…)
You might not want to present your movies in ranked order, but if not, are you still going to discuss all 20 with equal importance? Highly unlikely. You’re going to pick out 2 or 3 to mention–so make those the ones that the eye naturally gravitates to.
And when presenting any series of information, you always want to identify the most important item or items. Your bar chart with 10 data points? The point you’re making is most likely contained in only one of those bars–so highlight it.
A Word Cloud doesn’t just highlight the most important item by size, but it also shows relationships between multiple items. “The Sting” is arguably the best con movie ever made. “The Grifters” and “The Thomas Crown Affair” in my opinion are not as good, but equivalent to each other.
Here are a few suggestions as to how a Word Cloud might work in your presentation:
- Historical profitable years
- Global offices by size
- Core capabilities of your company
- Client list according to revenue
- Employees according to years of service
- Grant recipients according to amount of funding
How easy is it to create a Word Cloud? Just go to wordle.net and take it from there. I’ve found that the easiest way to gather and rank my information is to use Excel, then copy and paste into Wordle. And from Wordle, you can print as a PDF or do a screen capture. Here’s what my worksheet looks like for my movie list (the “~” characters keep multi-word phrases together in Wordle.)
Want to get extra fancy? Recreate your Wordle manually in PowerPoint (or Keynote), then apply grow/shrink (or scale) animations to your items to show a change over time. For example, what did the relative revenues from your top 20 clients look like 5 years ago? And what do they look like today? Make your own Hans Roling data presentation! Well, kind of.
