preview of select effective visuals book
TRANSCRIPT
Select Effective
Visuals: The
Business
Professional’s Guide
to Selecting &
Creating Effective
Presentation Visuals
Book preview
As a business
professional like an
accountant, engineer,
manager, or executive,
how do you select
visuals for your
important
presentations?
You likely rely on the same
graphs or diagrams that you
have always used.
Sometimes you grab a cool
slide a colleague created
and modify it. But how do
you know if you are
selecting the best visual to
communicate the message
you are delivering on each
slide?
0
2
4
6
RegionA
RegionB
RegionC
RegionD
2012
2013
2014
Prior Year Budget Actual
Midwest 22.70% 22.60% 22.50%
Northeast 25.80% 26.10% 26.20%
South 25.10% 25% 24.80%
West 26.40% 26.30% 26.50%
Results
Services
Products
Customers
You’d like to use some of the
effective visuals you see in
business publications like the
Wall Street Journal, but you
don’t want to become a
graphic designer. It would be
great if there was a resource
you could use to quickly select
the right visual for any
business message, with
examples and instructions on
how to create the visuals in the
software you already use,
Excel and PowerPoint.
Now there is. My new
book, Select Effective
Visuals: The Business
Professional’s Guide
to Selecting and
Creating Effective
Presentation Visuals,
is the resource you
have been looking for.
Here’s why my clients trust me to teach
their staff how to select and create an
effective visuals for a business
presentations:
• I have a degree in Engineering and an MBA, so I
understand business topics and issues
• I am one of fourteen PowerPoint MVPs
recognized by Microsoft for my contributions to
the presentation community
• I teach the approach in this book to hundreds of
business professionals each year in customized
workshops and they apply the ideas immediately
to create more effective presentations
• I create hundreds of slide makeovers using this
method for the workshops, proving the ideas work
for real business presentations
Using the HVF approach in this book, you don’t
need any graphics or design background to create
an effective presentation visual. Follow these three
steps:
1 Write a Headline summarizing your message
2 Select and create an effective Visual
3 Focus the audience during delivery
The majority of this book deals with the hardest
step for business professionals: selecting the
appropriate visual.
After reviewing tens of thousands of slides and
working for years to develop a repeatable
method of selecting the appropriate visual, I
have concluded that almost every message in a
business presentation can be organized into
one of six categories. Those categories can be
further broken down into 30 groups and sub-
groups. I’ve identified 66 visuals that fit into
those groups and sub-groups.
Here’s how the categories, groups, sub-groups and
visuals are organized:
Here are some of the visuals you will learn about in
Category 1, Comparing Numbers/Values/Size. This is the
largest category by far.
A dashed line on a bar chart
allows quick comparison of
values to a single standard
A multiple width overlapping column
graph is a visual to use when comparing
values in multiple data series
Multiple 100% stacked bars
show the comparison of one
segment to the whole across
multiple time periods
Here are some of the visuals you will learn about in
Category 2, Relationship of Sequence, and Category 3,
Relationship over time:
A decision tree shows a
sequence of choices and
endpoints
A timeline shows when events
occur over a period of time
A Gantt chart created using a
table is easy to construct and
shows the duration of events
along the timeline
Here are some of the visuals you will learn about in Category
4, Relationship between Entities, Category 5, A person,
place, or object, and Category 6, Example or Demonstration:
A table shows a comparison
on a number of criteria
A full screen image makes an
impact during your
presentation
A case study demonstrates how
your proposed solution has
worked in the past
For each of the 66 visuals, you see examples, when it can be
used, and get instructions on creating that visual in Excel or
PowerPoint. In all, there are 196 color examples in the book.
Right now, you only use the visuals you have seen. After
reading Select Effective Visuals, you will have an expanded
inventory of visuals to use in your presentations. And you will
have the knowledge of how to create them in the tools you
are already familiar with. There is no need to use graphics
software or learn data visualization programming languages.
<code>
X=32;Y=54;
</code>
No programming or
coding to learn
No graphics software
required
If you are ready to get started using more
effective visuals in your presentations,
order your copy of Select Effective
Visuals: The Business Professional’s
Guide to Selecting and Creating
Effective Presentation Visuals today.
Use one of the links below.
Printed books
US links:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Canadian link:
Amazon
PDF e-book version
From my website
Want to read the
Introduction from the
book or need some
more information? Click
here to learn more.