Chapter 6. Adding Charts, Diagrams, and Tables

Chapter 6. Adding Charts , Diagrams, and Tables

Making your point visually is almost always more effective than slapping up a bunch of bullet points or a column full of numbers . That's why PowerPoint lets you create awesome charts, diagrams, and tables. Many new PowerPointers avoid these tools out of intimidation . That's a shame, because a good bar chart, Venn diagram, or data table can communicate more information than a dozen slides full of bullet pointswith far fewer droopy eyelids.

Microsoft has seriously upgraded PowerPoint 2007's charting, diagramming, and table-creation tools. There's a new graphics engine, dozens of new diagram types, and galleries of professionally designed pick-and-click styles. You can even preview the styles live on your charts, diagrams, and tables before applying them. In short, you've got no excuse for leaving eye-popping, effective visuals out of your presentation.

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Tip: PowerPoint's new tools are really Microsoft Office's new tools. In other words, the way you create charts, diagrams, and tables in Word and Excel is pretty darn similar to the way you create them in PowerPoint, and the result is identical-looking visuals.

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On the down side, Microsoft's "let everyone customize everything" philosophy can be a little overwhelming: in addition to the newly designed ribbons , buttons , and options, PowerPoint 2007 retains nearly all of the settings dialog boxes that PowerPoint 2003 offered .

This chapter gets you making great-looking charts, diagrams, and tables fast . Then it explains the different elements you can customize, gives you examples of why you'd want to customize them, and walks you through the customization process.

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Tip: In addition to creating charts, diagrams, and tables in PowerPoint, you can paste them in from other programs. Read on to learn how.

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DESIGN TIME
Go Easy on the Extras

This chapter shows you the quickest, most powerful ways to customize your visuals, and the Appendix shows you how to get help with the more arcane customization options PowerPoint offers.

But before you roll up your sleeves and customize every single tiny detail of your charts, diagrams, and tables, consider that the goal of every presentation is the same: to communicate something to an audience. In most cases, your audience couldn't care less if you beveled your table column headings to point up instead of down, or if you choose pink over salmon for your diagram's background. Your audience is after meaning . So always keep these question in mind: Why are you showing them this particular chart or diagram? Why have you chosen to highlight the second row of the table and not the third?

If you've presented solid data in the clearest, most dramatic way possible and you have a little time left over, by all means add that bevel effect. Otherwise, save yourself some work (and your audience some eye-rolling) and leave it out.