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It can be tricky to distribute text bubbles evenly on a circle. To make it easier, you can put a temporary shape inside the circle like in the example below. Delete it after your bubble chart is complete.
UPDATE, I have now added charts based on this concept to the SlideMagic template store, click the image to find out more.
I am learning a lot from the search bar in my template store, especially those searches that (still) deliver zero results. “Waterfall” is one of those.
Waterfall charts are the secret weapon of McKinsey and other strategy consultants. They are great to explain the source of change between two values (last year, this year for example). In Excel they are tricky to make, especially if values zoom up and down the zero axis.
In an earlier blog post (all the way back in 2008, nine years ago…), I explained the basics of creating waterfall charts in Excel. The secret is to make blank series in a stacked column chart that create the requires offset for the delta values.
For my store, I am working on an automated tool that creates waterfalls. It is still work in progress though, I want to to be very robust.
In the mean time, I have added a manual version of the waterfall to my template store. I created the general layout, fixed the colours. Still you will have to do some calculations and adjustments to make it fit your specific set of numbers. Also, you will need to add data labels manually. But with a bit of fiddling, you should get a good result.
Work in progress.
Today, I added a slide to the SlideMagic template store that shows how I usually visualise some sort of competitive comparison or product differentiation. I took SlideMagic itself as an example:
The slide pretty much sums up how I see SlideMagic. In the app, it is really easy to change slides, in PowerPoint it can be a bit of an exercise to add a column in a 4x5 grid and keep everything nice and organised. Most online template stores try to hard with design that look horrible when pasted into a corporate PowerPoint template, and most of all, template stores are run by designers and not by former strategy consultants, so they won’t always have the charts you actually need most in a business presentation.
Feel free to “steal” my design and copy it yourself, or download it instantly from the SlideMagic PowerPoint template store. Have a look at other slides in the template store about competition and competitive advantage.
Photo by Alex Holyoake on Unsplash
All the SlideMagic businesses and web sites run on different platforms. Through design, I have tried to keep a consistent look and feel as you click from one environment to the other. Yesterday, I made some drastic changes to URLs, and consolidated the facebook pages into one. Let’s see what all this does to my Google search results, but more importantly, hopefully all the redirects work and the user experience stays good.
Here is everything as it stands at the moment. There is still room for more consistency…
Let me know if you experience any broken links or other issues.
Business speak is full of cliches, and when you take a cliche headline, and use a cliche image composition to visualise it, you get a cliche ad:
The small print in the ad:
Always one step ahead of the game: Predictions prove a bright future for you. Out autonomous vehicle will be safer, smarter and instinctively more brilliant than anything on the road
On the web site, it has a slightly different version of this (which is actually clearer and gets to the point what the ad means):
Always one step ahead of the game: Complex driving environment requires driver’s fast decision making and responsiveness. Autonomous Ioniq detects and protects its driver even before driver notices hazardous driving situations on the road. Hyundai Motor Company steps forward to bring safe driving environment for everyone.
The ad agency should have picked another visualisation to support their message. The current one is a cliche visual, but also the slow-paced chess does not connect to snap second decisions that can save lives.
This article The improbable origins of PowerPoint is probably the most detailed story of how PowerPoint became what it is today I have read.
When you want to show a P&L with very few lines, consider using a column chart instead of the more traditional data table. In the chart below you can see how to go about it. Use a bold color for the profit series, a light color for the COGS, and manually add the gross profit as bubbles.
Things get a bit trickier for years where there is a loss. You create a separate data series in the same color as the last cost category (opex in this example), and calculate how much of the opex goes under the line and how much above. Tweak data labels manually. For these types of charts it is best to sketch them completely on a piece of paper, and then fiddle with PowerPoint/Excel to get it right.
The column chart works well, it shows a number of trends in 1 slide: sales growth, profit growth, and how fixed/variable certain cost types are.
Below is the data I used to create this chart.
You can recreate your own chart with the description above, or download the example from the SlideMagic template bank.
I am across this chart recently:
This chart can be improved in a number of ways:
I replaced the chart with the one below in PowerPoint, using a line graph with big markers instead of the bars.
Ideally, I would have like to flip the chart 90 degrees, but this would require quite a lot of PowerPoint surgery (you can probably do it with a scatter chart somehow). The other option is to construct a highly complicated “waterfall” chart.
PowerPoint templates get corrupted over time. It usually starts with a template that was designed by a print graphics designer as an after thought after designing the logo and the business cards: creating slide layouts without paying much attention to the technical issues of programming a template that can be (ab)used by thousands of employees. Then over, slowly but gradually, “foreign” templates infect the original until nothing is left of the original.
I go back to zero every time I design a new presentation. The file that I put up in the SlideMagic template store is pretty much the one I start every new presentation design project with. It is really simple. You can customise it with your own colours and you are good to go.
When creating a new slide, go to the “Layout” button in the top left of the menu to create a select a new slide layout.
A while ago, I discussed how to create a “focal point” slide, where a series of triangles can create the illusion of text boxes all disappearing in one big point. You can read the instructions how to create it in this blog post, but now you can also find them in the template store.
I am spending part of my daily time that I used to invest in blog posts, and increasing the library of my template store, I have an infinite amount of template ideas in my head, so there is still a lot of work for me cut out. Ultimately, the value of this store will be some sort of subscription, as a sign of support for me, in return for which you get unlimited access to all the designs. The combination of a powerful search engine and the largest library of useful charts on the net, I think the proposition of 1 second downloads will beat the alternative of manually copying my designs. Let’s see how it goes.