this is something that just so many people get wrong if you follow this advice it will significantly impact the quality and professionally of your PowerPoint presentations hi guys I'm Henry from from learning welcome to another episode in my channel this video is an excerpt of my online course on creating powerpoints like presentations in the same way a stock management consulting firm such as BCG or bain do as you may know I work myself in one of those firms for over six years I created thousands of PowerPoint slides this is really what my work was all about for majority of the time and I gave very valuable knowledge and insights into how to create these presentations in most professional jobs one of the main reasons to use PowerPoint is to visualize data and to present data in one chart however how exactly the data is presented in the chart and what the chart consists of is very unclear and you see very elemental mistakes being done here when you create presentations in consulting or actually any business at all there should be one rule and this is that you should be able to take out one page of representation Dec and that the page itself should be self explanatory to everybody who just picks it up and reads it and the reason is that very often these kind of presentations are not used for Steve Jobs style keynote speeches or dresses it's not really meant to be presented even though of course sometimes this happens this way but very frequently these kind of documents are really used as documents then are shared in the organization sometimes saved for many months and years to come and then it is important that maybe in a year from now when a new colleague enters the organization picks our presentation reads something is able to understand what was meant at that time especially because the employee who maybe created the deck or created a specific page maybe it's not in the company company anymore at all right so this is why it's important that a page speaks for itself is self explained taury and nobody needs to be there to really explain it to somebody but you can just understand it by looking at it and this is exactly what this video will focus on we will talk about how to visualize data in a diagram and then specifically how the diagram should be composed in order for the diagram to be self explanatory this video is an excerpt from our course on CEO level presentations on how to create presentations like top management consulting firms like BCG or Bain do if you're interested to have a look at the full course and read the reviews of what other people think about the course have a look at the video description you will find a link to the course actually with a discount coupon included in it let's jump into it another really crucial concept when visualizing your data is the concept of making your charts speak for themselves and what that means is the following you know you really have to think back about how these presentations how these top management presentations will be going to use and the fact is that these presentations often get sent around among top management or among other apartments and then people have your document in their hand and they want to understand what they see by themselves without you needing to stand next to them and to take their hand and explain every little thing and sing to them so what's really important is that you are able to create your charts and I think this is especially relevant to charts because charts can often be confusing to many people so it's really important that you are able to create your charts in a way that they are self-contained speak for themselves and contain all the information necessary that are required for a good compression of them so let's just look into some things which are really crucial for that to be possible so what are the things that should be included in every chart the first thing is something like clear description of a chart so basically what do I see right and here's just one example so here is a chart comparing different regions on a certain kind of metrics so the the title could be Europe a generic market dynamics per region and of course try to do it as tangible and as concrete as possible and what's always important is the unit of measurement so what is actually showing and you would be surprised how many you know charts exist out there presentation that do not even tell you what the unit of measurement is and I mean this chance be complicated because it has three dimensions you have this one axis you have this one axis and then the bubble itself the diameter of the bubble is the dimension for itself and T of course it's crucial that you give the unit of measurement of every single dimension that you use so here it says percentage of revenue here is the percentage of revenue away and here kind of the the unit of measurement is euro million and well I just want to highlight this whenever you use percentage it's always important to always say you know the percentage of what is given here and as you can easily see if you just talk about operating margin so it's more or less clear that this is some kind of percentage but margins are defined in very different ways right and it's not always given or not always clear that the margin is calculated as a percentage of revenue so really make it clear here that you are referring to revenue and the same is of course true for the cater for the compounded annual growth rate so of course that is a percentage but the growth rate of what are we looking at of the profits of the revenues or what are we talking about right so always really make here just make it a good habit of yours that whenever you write percentage that you write percentage of something and make clear what there's something is another thing that's really important but very often forgotten is the time so when kind of from when is this data coming from what data do I see and here it's given the year 2014 here is given the timeframe of the growth rate we're looking at so here are only two years and this is really important because it's not really intuitive what that would be right because often these presentations might be go around might be sent around one or two years later after you created them and that nobody knows anymore from day but even if you created two right now and you are basing the data on some kind of research report for instance that you found somewhere in this case it's some kind of annual reports it's not a research research report but you know the data is coming from somewhere from some kind of source and the source is probably not basically created today right but in the past so make sure that you indicate clearly from when the data is so that the audience or your readers really can know that another important thing is the legend or chart key so whenever you use some kind of color coding or other things that are necessary to understand use a legend and here we are using a legend for these circles to explain that the diameter of the circles matter that they mean something diameter based on market size and then what you see here is that these two circuits are covered colored so these are bluegrass the others are gray so here is not included legend for that you could truly do that and the reason why here is not included legend is that kind of it refers to in the title that the recommendation on this page is to focus on these two regions so it's kind of logical within the structure of the page why these two kind of countries are highlighted but of course you could highlight the tiras way and then what's always helpful with these kinds of things is to include the source so where is the data actually coming from and often it's some kind of report but even if you got the data from within the company for instance you went to the management accounting department and those guys gave you some data sets they mention the department from where the data is from this also really helps to make it transparent and often you will have the discussion in the company that you know people are looking into different kind of data sources and one department you know the data looks like this the other department the similar data looks a bit different so always make sure it's coming from so that it's relevant and then just the general point you know any other relevant qualification of the chart anything else that is necessary and is required to really understand what you're seeing put it on the chart because people otherwise might not be able to understand that anymore later and just one thing that comes to mind what is often done wrongly in customer service right so so imagine you conducted a customer service or you are citing some kind of resides on some kind of customer surveys that somebody it's conducted and what's really crucial with this kind of data is to include where the customer survey took place right so was it European survey or was it a German survey as you probably paid no no but from X and I'm actually coming from Germany or was it an American survey or was it a global survey because the implication of the data is very different if it's a global survey versus a survey that was conducted in a very specific country and I mean even in consulting companies like like mine you you would find it amazing how often you you see kind of customer survey data being sent around with no clear indication even though this is of course bad bad practice people forget to write it and then it's useless right because you do not really know where the data is coming from where it was kind of collected and then this really really limits the things that you can do with it with it just one small note that actually just catched myself so here for the operating margin we do not have a year information right so it would be good practice to include a year as well so from which year did you took the operating margin from okay I hope that's that's kind of clear and I hope that wasn't too detailed for you but I think it's really really important to get that across that you just need to make sure that you put all the information on your chart that is required to understand it and to let it speak for itself don't let other people guess what your chart means to really make it clear for them because otherwise people will be confused and your nel is this won't be so helpful thanks again everybody for watching this video actually it was valuable for you please press the like button and if you would like to keep up to date with all the content that I have and the next days and weeks please subscribe to the channel and you will be informed I have many pieces of video planned for the future both on how to create PowerPoint slide presentations meeting the standards of strategy consulting firms but also on other topics on business and management and to make you successful in the first years of your career this is from learning thank you for watching