How
charts and graphs help
Creating your own
Using colour and backgrounds for effect
Pictographs
Graphs and charts show relationships would be hard to show any other way and can be very persuasive. Be careful though, it is easy to be selective with data and make things look better than they actually are!
PowerPoint allows you to create graphs and charts in a variety of formats
PowerPoint makes it easy to create your own graphs and charts. It provides you with a ready made graph which you adapt by adding your own data. You can select from a variety of graph and chart styles to suit your audience. The best way to use this feature is practice first with some alternative layouts and test them on sample learners/audience to see which is easiest to understand.
Using colour and backgrounds for effect
Using different colours for the bars on a bar chart or slices on a pie chart will enhance the effect. Using PowerPoint's Custom Animation feature when creating the slide allows the presenter to introduce the chart one segment at a time.
Chart bars coloured separately to aid differentiation of segments and aid audience interpretation
Try adding a picture as background to make the chart more interesting. Notice the example below succeeds because the picture is low contrast and so doesn't clash with the detail.
Photograph as background to enhance slide and visually link data to subject
Pictographs represent statistical relationships using symbols. They are well suited to presentations as they convey a basic message effectively when precision may not be necessary (detailed graphs could be provided as a handout). The example below was created using a Microsoft Clipart pie slice. This was was copied and pasted into columns to represent a sales trend.
Pictographs are great ways to get simple messages across