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.