Outlining Your Presentation

Stay with me on this one. It’s long, but important. If I had a single piece of advice to give to someone about to create a presentation, it would be…

OUTLINE YOUR PRESENTATION

And yet, the vast majority of presentations I design for others skip the one step that will make their writers’ job a controlled process as opposed to random chaos.

Like the vast majority of the world, you probably sit down to create your story and immediately dive into using PowerPoint or Keynote writing headers, bullet points and blocks of text. You probably also quickly start trying to format text and find images on Google that support the idea that just came into your head. Why?

It seems easier
You think you don’t have time to put off writing “the meat”
The software all but begs you to start writing your headers and bullet points.

The problem with rejecting the use of an outline is that you end up forever trying to get a sense of the big picture, get mired in details, miss major components and ultimately find yourself having to identify your story structure near the end from the pieces in front of you.

I am often asked for “a template so I can start writing my content.” I always respond that I would prefer to design content and not just a frame around it. I hope that Stephen King doesn’t need a designed book jacket to start outlining and writing a novel.

One reason why outlining is crucial is that most presentations undergo heavy editing from colleagues and superiors. That’s just life. But I have designed countless 1st drafts that, when shown to the boss, ended up completely rewritten because the focus was wrong or the big picture was missed. A solid 1-page outline might save countless wasted hours on your next presentation. So, how do you outline?

OUTLINING BY HAND

But if you prefer outlining by hand, consider using sticky notes (any size that works for you) and a wall or large table to compose your overall story. I admit that I rarely find that this method fits me personally, but Duarte Design, the country’s leading presentation firm, swears by sticky notes and advocates for them passionately. (Note that there are also software versions of sticky notes if you prefer the keyboard like I do.)

OUTLINING WITH MICROSOFT WORD OR ANOTHER TEXT EDITOR

Way before you start thinking about slides, fonts, colors and imagery, you should be thinking about content. And Microsoft Word—for all it’s endless faults—is a very serviceable word processor to lay down and organize your ideas. If you choose to make this a detailed prose outline, more power to you. There will be time later to edit 3 paragraphs of text into a slide that says only “Poor customer service has reduced customer base by 25%.”

Or, you can keep your Word outline more traditional—just like you did in high school when you wrote term papers: hierarchical lists and numbered lists. For this style, use a small font, reduce your margins, and resist long sentences so you can see your entire outline on 1-2 pages.

In either case, if you spend an extra few minutes setting up your Word outline, you will be able to convert your document into PowerPoint slides with the click of a button. To do this, you’ll need to use paragraph styles in Word. You can use the default styles that Word gives you or you can modify them or create your own. What’s important is that you apply a “Heading 1” style to every line that you want to be a new slide header. “Heading 2” should be applied to any text that you want to be a 1st level bullet point. “Header 3” and so on, should be used for subsequent level bullets.

After you’ve applied headers, you have 2 methods for moving into PowerPoint…

Method #1: “Send to Microsoft Office PowerPoint”

This is a handy little one-touch tool that you will never find in any of the Office ribbons. To use this, you need to add it to your quick access toolbar by going to the Windows circular button (top left), selecting “Word Options” and then “Customize.” From the pulldown menu at the top, select “All Commands” and scroll down until you find “Send to Microsoft Office PowerPoint.” “Add” this to your custom toolbar and you’ll be good to go. Now, once your Word doc is properly set up, just click the newly added icon and a PowerPoint file will be automatically created from your text outline—as many slides as you have indicated.

Method #2: Open “All Outlines…” from PowerPoint
From within PowerPoint Cntrl-O or “Open” from the Office Button. Under “Files of Type,” select “All Outlines.” This will allow you to open and convert your styled Word doc into PPT slides. You can also open a few other types of text files, although your conversion mileage may vary depending on how they were set up.

With either method, this is what you’ll get. Obviously, you’ll have more work to do in applying a template and designing your information, but if your outline passed the tests in Word, you should now be able to think about visualizing your message as opposed to creating it.

OUTLINING WITH POWERPOINT

Unless you’re simply going to use your first couple slides as a word processor (not a bad idea…) I strongly recommend doing your outlining away from PowerPoint to avoid the temptation to make slides while you write. But if you must…take a look at at the left side of your screen at your slide thumbnails. At the top there is a tab for “Outline view” which will display the hierarchical text from your slide headers and bulleted copy. The cool thing about outline view is that you can type your headers and bullets on slides or directly in the thumbnail outline pane. Either way, PPT creates new slides for you. You can also reorder your slides directly in the outline pane, or you can switch to slide sorter to get a birds’ eye view and do the same. If you do use outline preview, you should pull the pane out to the right as far as it will go, reducing the actual slide on the pasteboard to a thumbnail. You should be focusing on the outline here, not the slide itself.

OUTLINING WITH EXCEL (My Favorite*)

All of my writing—even the plays and screenplays I have written—tend to be very modular in style. And perhaps as a result, I find that Excel is actually most effective for me as an outlining tool. I’m not a numbers guy, but for some reason I’m pretty good at using a spreadsheet to lay out my topics and ideas. I find Excel to be great at re-ordering sections, creating hierarchies, making notes, hiding and unhiding text, sorting and color coding. Furthermore, if I use small enough text (and a large enough monitor), Excel allows me to see my entire project on a single page. I can get an immediate visual sense of my story in one glance.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I’ve designed, created and seen thousands of presentations from children’s school reports to major CEO addresses and $100 million dollar business pitches. I even did some work for a certain financial institution when they had to explain themselves to the public after they might have contributed to a certain recent financial meltdown. And without fail, the one factor that all “successful” presentations have shared in common, was planning, organization and a controlling story. Design can only help communicate your story better. It can’t help if you don’t know what your story is.

A strong well-written outline is the surest way, in my opinion, to achieve a successful presentation and tell an effective story.

*I also want to note that I recently discovered an amazing Mac-only app called Scrivener that I’m currently using to outline and write a fiction piece. For organizing any type of research or creative writing project, I’ve never seen anything as robust and useful.

Categories: Visual Thinking.

Hardware Graphics Acceleration for Smooth Transitions

Full-screen fades actually use a lot of computing power, and if you don’t have a super powerful machine, you may find animations (and video) acting sluggish: everything from hesitation to start to chunky instead of smooth fades.

There are a number of best practices for presenting such as plugging your computer in, running no other applications and running your presentation from your hard drive as opposed to a network or flash drive. But the simplest “boost” you can give your PowerPoint presentation is to enable “Hardware Graphic Acceleration.”

You can find it under the “Slide Show Tab” under “Set Up Show.” By default this is usually unchecked. In theory, this setting travels with the file, but it can easily get unchecked if you crash or for other unknown reasons.

I would only enable this if you are having performance issues as it sometimes can actually cause complex animations or some video to run worse. That’s Microsoft for you.

Note that there is also a “Hardware Graphics Acceleration” control for Windows itself which needs to be fiddled with in some cases (such as playing video on IBM Thinkpads.) If you need help with these larger performance issues, just email me and I’ll be happy to help where I can.

Categories: Animation, PowerPoint.

Hardware Graphics Acceleration for Smooth Transitions

I would only enable this if you are having performance issues as it sometimes can actually cause complex animations or some video to run worse. That’s Microsoft for you.

Categories: Animation, PowerPoint.

Slide Transitions

PowerPoint offers over 50 different slide transitions. And I don’t think I’ve ever used 45 of them.

I have one simple rule for using animation:

Animate only if helps tell your story

Sometimes, animating in elements on a slide or moving things around with motion paths actually does help convey your meaning. But a checkerboard transition from slide to slide usually says little more than, “Look at me! Look at me! I found the transition function in PowerPoint!”

If you’re thinking about using the Wagon Wheel transition, I’ve got a rule of thumb: If you don’t see Spielberg or Scorsese using it, don’t use it for your presentation. Actually, I’ll amend that slightly.

While 99% of video, TV and film edits are hard cuts, they have the advantage of sound, music and dialogue to link shots together. For presentations, I prefer simple fades from slide to slide to give a slight sense of movement and to prevent things from feeling like an old-time carousel slide show (“next slide…next slide…next slide…”)

Rarely, I’ll use a push transition as part of a trick for a larger animation effect. Rarely.
The soon to be released PowerPoint 2010 will offer new transitions. Yes, they will be cool (as they attempt to keep up with Appple’s Keynote), but I beg you—practice some restraint…

Categories: Animation, PowerPoint.

Edward Tufte

Of the dozen or so “go to” books I have on my desk at work, 4 of them are by Edward Tufte.

Acknowledged as the godfather of information design, Tufte was an academic whose first self-published book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, became an instant classic and filled a huge unknown void. It was named one of the “100 Best Non-Fiction Books of the Century” by Amazon. He has since followed up with 3 more books (Envisioning Information, Visual Explanations, Beautiful Evidence) along with his screed on the evils of Powerpoint, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint.

Tufte is a passionate advocate for clear and effective data and information design, so much so that he was recently appointed to the President’s Recovery and Reinvestment Act advisory panel “to provide transparency in the use of Recovery-related funds.”

At times, I think Tufte goes a bit overboard in his railings against PowerPoint in that he views the software as synonymous with presentation itself (and bad presentation at that) and not simply as a tool—that can be used for good or for evil. Still, his analysis of and conclusion that the misuse of PowerPoint contributed to the Columbia Shuttle disaster is absolutely fascinating reading, and a worthwhile warning for anyone who relies on presentation to communicate a difficult, but important message.

While Tufte’s book are beautifully designed works of art, they can be a little daunting at time to the average reader. Still, I strongly recommend his regular one day seminars held around the country to anyone who has to present as part of their job. Seminar registrants are given a copy of each of the 4 books. From Tufte’s website, here are the upcoming seminars.

Denver, CO — June 11, 2010
Portland, OR — June 14, 2010
Seattle, WA — June 15 & 16, 2010

Tufte coined the term “chart junk” which I’ve talked about —all those extraneous gridlines, tick marks, 3D effects and redundant labels. And here Tufte shows his minimalist approach to data design. But he is also a big fan of packing as much useful information as you can into a graphic. Think of a well-designed train schedule or a subway map. In this area, Tufte always refers to a famous 1869 Charles Minard analysis of Napoleon’s disastrous 1812 March to Moscow as “the best statistical graphic ever drawn.” In a single visual, Minard elegantly plots a half-dozen variables, each of which could warrant its own separate chart.

Categories: Books, Showing Data.

Be Like Ken Burns: Zoom and Pan Your Photos

Ken Burns, the documentary film-maker behind The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz and others, knows something about telling a story with images and voiceover. He’s brilliant at presenting information on a screen.

Because many of his films involve subject matter with little or no video footage (and because he never does reenactments), Burns relies heavily on the use of historical still imagery. And to bring this imagery alive, he makes heavy use of a film technique called pan and zoom in which the camera moves closer or farther away from the image and/or moves across the image.

Burns is so associated with this film technique that at one point, Apple actually called it’s automatic pan and zoom feature in iMovie the Ken Burns Effect.

So, what does this have to do with your PowerPoint?

In replacing a series of bullet points with an image, you’ve most likely increased the effectiveness of your message and presentation. But at times, static imagery might start to feel a little…static.

By using PowerPoint’s “Shrink/Grow” and “Motion Path” animation effects (or Keynote’s “Move” & “Scale”), you can be just like Ken Burns and add a sense of movement, depth and drama to your imagery.

Even just a slight pan, zoom in or zoom out can help give a sense of depth and movement to an image. Let’s say you’re talking about NASCAR. A full screen image would be good, but zooming and panning adds a bit of drama.

Keynote allows you to visually size and move your image end state when applying “scale” and “move” which is a very nice feature. In PowerPoint, there’s a little trial and error involved as you’ll have to make some initial guesses when typing in sizing percentages and setting a motion path. If you do want to zoom and pan simultaneously (which you’ll often want to do to focus in on the perfect part of the photo as an end state), you need to set both animations to run simultaneously by setting the second animation to happen “with previous.” Additionally, if using a motion path you’ll want to select “effect options” and deselect “Smooth start” and “Smooth end.” Otherwise, you’ll get a dizzying effect on screen.

I should point out that if you’re zooming in by a large percentage in PowerPoint, your image will start to pixelate no matter how large the image was when you inserted it on your slide. This is because PowerPoint unfortunately “sets” the image prior to the animation. So, if you grow it by 300%, it will become 1/3 as crisp. Depending on the image and the zoom percentage, you may not notice any difference, but you would not want to use this technique to grow a logo by 500%. Zooming out on an image has no effect on quality, and you don’t have to worry about this issue in Keynote. I will point out that there is a somewhat complicated workaround for this image zooming problem. I won’t go into here, but if there are any power presenters who are interested in learning the trick, just email me and I’ll explain it.

Remember that whole “a picture is worth a 1,000 words” thing? Try it next time you’re putting together a presentation. Take the on screen text from a slide like this, and put it into the speaker notes…

Make your image full screen, and then animate it a bit…

Make your image full screen, and then animate it a bit….

If you want to see an example of this effect in action from one of my presentations as well as a couple of ways to tell distinct stories with a photograph and this technique, download this file. And, of course, if you have any questions about this topic or anything related to presentation, just drop me an email anytime at nolan@nolanhaims.

Categories: Animation, Keynote, PowerPoint.

Who is TED?

I recently had the opportunity to design my first presentation for the TED Conference, held this past February in Long Beach. Jonathan Klein, the fascinating CEO of Getty Images delivered a talk entitled, “Photos That Changed the World.” If you’re not familiar with TED (Technology Entertainment Design), it’s a non-profit that runs regular conferences dedicated to “Ideas Worth Spreading.”

Imagine gathering together the smartest and most intriguing people (though not always famous) and asking the

m to give brief presentations on what they know best. For those who aren’t fortunate enough to attend and hobnob over dinners, the collection of videotaped TEDTalks on TED’s website, distributed under a Creative Commons license, are some of the best examples of effective and engaging presentations you’ll ever find.

Bill Gates, Al Gore, Jane Goodall, Tony Robbins, Malcolm Gladwell & Richard Dawkins are just a few of the people who have given TEDTalks over the years. (Click the Tony Robbins link if you want to see a heartfelt face to face criticism of Al Gore. It starts about 6 minutes in.)

This year’s conference featured talks by James Cameron,Jaime Oliver, Sheryl Crow, Temple Grandin, Sarah Silverman, Valerie Plame and David Rockwell to name just a few. This kind of diversity is one of the wonderful things about TED. The only thing that group of people has in common is that they have something to say worth hearing.

TED Rules

The primary reason that I love TED is that it has helped elevate and bring attention to quality presentation. The conference has long been infamous for laying down a set of rules for its speakers that makes even the most accomplished presenter sweat bullets in preparation. The biggest rule is a strict adherence to time. Even renowned guests are often given no more than 18 minutes to speak. We were given 4 minutes. In that time, we had to present something compelling to a super smart audience that wanted to be taught something they didn’t know by an expert in his field.

The constraint of time is a wonderful tool for creating a good presentation. At Edelman, we are regularly given up to 2 hours to deliver a new business pitch. The client can, of course, afford this time since they’re often in the position of awarding millions of dollars of business. However, I often think that if we only had 10 or 15 minutes to pitch, we would distill our story and offering to a point where there would be zero fat. Of course, it often takes longer to write less than it does more. And that’s an indication that fewer words are more effective than many.

For Jonathan Klein’s TED talk, we spent a great amount of time pouring over every single word and image in order not to waste a single second of the story. There was not a sliver of fat in “Photos That Changed the World.”

Though we received our TED rules by email, supposedly some speakers actually receive a stone tablet with the TED Commandments. I’m not kidding:

Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick
Thou Shalt Dream a Great Dream, or Show Forth a Wondrous New Thing, Or Share Something Thou Hast Never Shared Before
Thou Shalt Reveal thy Curiosity and Thy Passion
Thou Shalt Tell a Story
Thou Shalt Freely Comment on the Utterances of Other Speakers for the Sake of Blessed Connection and Exquisite Controversy
Thou Shalt Not Flaunt thine Ego. Be Thou Vulnerable. Speak of thy Failure as well as thy Success.
Thou Shalt Not Sell from the Stage: Neither thy Company, thy Goods, thy Writings, nor thy Desperate need for Funding; Lest Thou be Cast Aside into Outer Darkness.
Thou Shalt Remember all the while: Laughter is Good.
Thou Shalt Not Read thy Speech.
Thou Shalt Not Steal the Time of Them that Follow Thee

How many presentations have you sat through which violated not just one buy all ten of the above?

I recommend to everyone spending some time on the TED site and viewing videos. They are all between 2 and 20 minutes long–perfect for watching during lunch at your desk or when you need a web surfing break. There’s even a free TED iPhone app for your commutes.

In no order, here are a few of my favorite TEDTalks:

Jamie Oliver “Teach Every Child About Food”
Michael Moschen “Rhythm & Juggling”
Clifford Stoll “On…Everything”
Hans Rosling “The Best Stats You’ve Ever Seen”
Eric Giler “Wireless Electricity”
Jlll Bolte Taylor “Stroke of Insight”

And, of course, take a look at Jonathan Klein’s “Photos That Changed the World.”

Categories: Visual Thinking.

The iPad & Presentation

It’s been 10 days since the iPad release and opinions are still split as to whether Apple’s latest device will change the world or just result in a pricey shrug. After furiously playing and experimenting with it for a week, I have to agree with my friend Jeff Solomon when he says that we will just have to wait for the iPad to teach us how best to use it.

With regard to presentation, however, I am confident in saying that the iPad has opened up a new and exciting frontier. For me, it has revealed the true potential for what I like to call “3-D Information” and “3-D Presentation” where presentations are no longer linear and where the audience and speaker interact and control information on a level that PowerPoint (and Keynote) just can’t currently conceive of. If you think of your average old linear “PowerPoint” as a textual description of a house for sale, then “3-D Presentation” is an actual tour of the house where you can open up cabinets and rummage through closets. I have written a white paper on what the iPad might mean for the future of presentation which you can download here.

But for those interested in the immediate here and now (and who might be considering an iPad purchase), here are the 5 ways (as of this writing) that you can convert and show your current presentations on the iPad:

1. iPad Keynote Application – Apple created a version of their excellent PowerPoint-like desktop software specially for the iPad. The good news is that you can import (via iTunes) existing Keynote presentations as well as PowerPoint files into the iPad Keynote application, edit and then play them off the device. You can even hook up the iPad to an external monitor with an extra adaptor. The bad news is that the Keynote version of the iPad is much more limited in functionality than the desktop version. Depending on the complexity of your presentation, you are liable to lose certain animations, object groupings, unsupported custom fonts and hyperlinks among other things. If your Keynote has embedded video, this should still play on the iPad. PowerPoint files can also be imported into and run out of iPad Keynote, but you’re still liable to lose some functionality. Some problems can be fixed as iPad Keynote is capable of editing and even creating new presentations from scratch. If you get into its groove, you might even enjoy creating and editing on the iPad. But personally it’s still more than a little frustrating for me at this point.

2. PDF – Turn your presentation into a PDF and the iPad will be happy to display it. However, there is no easy way to get a PDF onto the device. You can email it to yourself, or post it online and view it in the Safari browser. Or you can use a 3rd party PDF viewer app such as GoodReader or PDF Reader Pro which will allow you load PDFs via iTunes. PDF apps are currently a little clunky, but should rapidly improve.

3. Movie – Turn your presentation into a Quicktime movie file. PowerPoint for the Mac and Keynote will do this for you, although neither creates clickable Quicktime movies anymore, resulting in a self-playing movie with timed transitions and little control.

4. iBook – The iPad is an incredible book reader and fortunately, it can import any book saved in the universal ePub format. Unfortunately, it’s not the easiest thing to create or convert to ePub. Adobe InDesign can do it as can a number of other apps such as the free Calibre. An ePub document is more complicated than a PDF and, obviously, it’s more suited to text-heavy documents. User-created ePub book creation is still in its infancy and it will get better as people learn the tricks to getting best results.

5. Photos – Surprisingly, the iPad’s simple, but fast and elegant Photos application impressed me the most as a presentation tool. Save your entire presentation as a series of JPEGs, drop them into an album in iPhoto and sync photos to your iPad. Each album appears as a stack of photos which you easily open and navigate with your fingers. You can even pull a mini filmstrip navigator at the bottom of the screen to rapidly scroll forwards and backwards through your series of photos (slides) or jump to a particular one. If you put different sections of your presentation into different photo albums, you can use the Photos home screen as a type of visual table of contents to move to different parts of your deck. You can also drop Quicktime movies into an iPhoto album and they appear on the iPad in between sequenced photos–no ned to switch to the iPad Video app.

* * *

In importing and running many different presentations to the iPad, the thing that became clear to me was the iPad cries out for non-linear presentation. Just putting a PowerPoint or PDF on the device results largely in a presentation on just a smaller screen. This is why I’m currently drawn to the Photos app. Of the above currently available solutions, Photos is the one presentation method that feels the most interactive and user-guided. And that’s what “3-D Presentation” for me is about: Allowing for a custom and intimate interaction with the content.

Hopefully, either Apple or another developer will step up and create a new type of presentation software that will not only make use of the iPad, but all the other technologies and hardware that are sure to follow and that are already quietly on the scene: large touch screens, touchscreen laptops, competing tablets, etc.

Again, if you want to read more, take a look at the white paper.

Categories: iPad, Keynote, PDF.

Sharing & Editing Large Files: YouSendIt & DropBox

It’s always a good idea to keep files as small as possible without sacrificing image quality (there’s no need to use 300dpi print-ready imagery in on screen presentations), but more often than not, presentations simply exceed the size limits imposed by many email systems.

Most corporate email systems impose a 5MB limit on attachments. And many will not give you a bounce back message indicating your file never made it to your recipient.

There are hundreds of solutions for transferring large files back and forth between colleagues and clients including ftp sites and custom file server solutions, but here are my two favorites that I use almost daily…

The concept is simple. Select a file on your own computer, tell YouSendIt who you want to receive it, and then upload it to YouSendIt’s website. The service then sends an email to your recipient(s) with a link for them to download the file anytime they like.

The service is fast, secure and comes with loads of options and features. Monthly subscriptions and corporate suites are available, but I just use their free plan with gives me a file maximum of 100MB and the ability to only send one file at a time. You can upload files via their website, but there are also plug-ins that allow you to upload from Outlook, Acrobat and MS Office. I use their free desktop application, YouSendIt Express, which lets me drag and drop files and which remembers previous email recipients.

One of my new favorite services, DropBox, has eliminated my need for carrying flash drives back and forth to work and has greatly simplified working with offsite designers when sharing large numbers of files. Like YouSendIt, DropBox’s concept is terribly simple. In essence, it is a shared networked folder that lives on the desktop of your computer. That’s it.

After installing the DropBox application, a folder (just like any other on your computer) is created on your desktop. As soon as you move files into this folder, DropBox begins backing them up to their server. All files are given small indicator icons to let you know if they are backed up, in process and/or shared with others.

And it’s the sharing with other users and on other computers that makes this app sing.

You can install the DropBox application on any other computer you wish, and once you log into your account, you will be given this same folder (and all its contents) on your desktop. You can then select any folder within and share the contents with anyone you wish. The shared folder will appear in the DropBox folder of the other user once they accept. If they do not have a DropBox account, files can be accessed via unique URL links provided for each of your files.

There are a lot of extras that you can explore such as folder management and downloads from your iPhone and automatic public slideshows from a folder of images. Accounts are free for storage up to 2GB. More space can be purchased, but if you use this link to sign up, both you and I will be given an extra 250MB right off the bat. Not a bad deal.

Truly, the best way to think of DropBox is as a network folder. You just don’t need a company’s servers to host it, and anyone—not just your fellow employees—can access it from anywhere. Here’s my DropBox…

Categories: Visual Thinking.

Don’t Use Pie Charts

If you ask me, “Should I use a pie chart for this data?” my answer will usually be “NO.”

People love their pie charts, but they really should be used sparingly and only when:

You need to show large differences in proportion
The “whole” is significant to your story
You have only 2 or 3 data points (or your data points can be grouped into 2-3 parts)

Let’s say I want to show a chart of teams that have won the World Series. If I stuck with just plugging in numbers and relying on Excel’s defaults, I might get this…

While the above is certainly colorful (and if I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard “Use more color to differentiate things…”), it couldn’t be farther from an effective display of data. First, the color-coded legend makes it impossible to reference the pie chart to find out which pie slice is which. And the lack of ranked order means it will take me days to figure out if the Reds have more wins than the Twins.

The above is hardly any better. While you should always try to place labels on or next to pie pieces (legends for pie charts are almost always wrong), we can see here that the amount of and type of data is just not suited for a pie chart. While I could manually put in the number of wins for each team, Excel seems to only give you the automatic option of percentage labels. And who really cares that the A’s have won 9% of all World Series? (For those raising their eyebrows, that includes wins in both Philly and Oakland.)

What all this data is demonstrating is that there is a story not being told. There is no MEANING to this data visually except that lots of teams have gone all the way. There are a thousand stories in this data, but you have to pick one and then show it. So, now let’s look at a pie chart WITH MEANING…

This, obviously, is much better. Especially for New York fans. The above is a good use of a pie chart, and the story is clear. But we have lost a lot of data. Let’s put that data back in without losing the core MEANING OF OUR DATA, which is that the Yankees are pretty good over the long term.

The above is certainly better, but it still forces the viewer to look multiple places and doesn’t tell as complete a story in context and as effortlessly as it could. The reason is that a pie chart is just not the right format for so many pieces of data. And while it’s interesting to know that the Washington Nationals won it once (this was their much earlier incarnation…), the individual team numbers are not crucial to our Bronx Bombers story. The solution?

Use a bar chart. Get rid of distracting colors, tick marks, unnecessary gridlines and most individual numbers. Without even a header or any further explanatory text, the story I’m now telling couldn’t be much clearer…

12 days until opening day!

Categories: Showing Data.