Line charts

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来自 National Research Tomsk State University 的课程

Presentation skills: Designing Presentation Slides

94 个评分

National Research Tomsk State University

Presentation skills: Designing Presentation Slides

94 个评分

课程 2（共 4 门，Specialization Presentation Skills: Speechwriting, Slides and Delivery）

“Powerpoint slides are like children: no matter how ugly they are, you’ll think they’re beautiful if they’re yours” — Scott Adams, author of the comic strip “Dilbert”. Due to this cause or another, it’s a huge stress to look at most Powerpoint slides. Depending on the “design” skills of the speaker and audience’s taste slides create different emotions from a slight annoyance to physical sickness. But that is not the worst thing. The worst thing is that instead of improving the presentation such slides confuse the audience, distract it and finally oblige the speaker to explain them rather than being quite self-explanatory. The goal of this course is to change that by equipping learners with a set of tools to create simple, clear and aesthetic slides which improve the presentation of the speaker. The course covers universal design principles, templates, colors, typefaces, slides’ typography, use of photos and pictograms, composition rules and ways to create clear and meaningful charts and diagrams. This course is not a PowerPoint fundamentals course. You should have a basic knowledge of either Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple Keynote software. Don’t meddle, make your slides matter.

从本节课中

Part 4: Diagrams and data visualization

This week is about typography and photographic illustrations. Applying basic typography rules allows to make decent looking slides only with text. The same goes to tables. If that’s not enough there are icons — do’s and don’ts of them when you try to spruce up your text-only slides. And finally using photos and vector arts to create really gorgeous stunning slides. Basic rules on how to search them on photobanks, how to combine them with text, when icons should be used instead of photos and vice versa.

Types of diagrams6:58

Hierarchy diagrams4:27

Process diagrams6:47

Relationships diagrams6:52

Data visualizations3:25

Column and bar charts11:09

Line charts3:10

Closing remarks2:03

与讲师见面

Alexei Kapterev
Lomonosov MSU BS

Line charts,

perhaps the easiest way to improve a line chart is to avoid the legend.

Let me explain you what I mean.

What the legend does to the reader,

it forces a lot of what I think is unnecessary eye movements.

It forces the reader to make jumps and compare three different shades of blue.

Something which could be easily avoided if you put

those labels right next to the lines themselves.

Yes, it requires a bit of manual work but

it saves a lot of time on the side of audience so

I encourage you to remove the legend and then replace it with direct labels.

Thing number two, this is the most important thing about line charts.

Remember that line charts are all about the trend.

What's the most important thing about the line charts is

whether you can see the trend clearly.

For example, can you see whether the amount of incidents stays the same or

falling.

In this chart it's not rising, clearly.

Neither can I.

However, if I put the trend on the chart,

we can see clearly, it stays roughly the same.

With this chart,

well we can see the beginning that everything sort of falls down.

But then the rest is history, right?

We have no idea what is happening here.

And maybe we should have an idea about what's happening here,

because this is like half of the chart.

And maybe we need to take a closer look,

to zoom in, to produce a separate chart in this particular instance.

And it's kind of clearer but not exactly, so maybe we need to add trends.

And now we can see that the yellow is falling, the blue line is rising,

and the green line roughly stays the same.

And sometimes if you're hunting for

trends, maybe it's worthwhile to produce a stacked area chart

because what will happen here, maybe it needs our investigation.

And finally, if you have five lines you will probably need two graphs.

Now I really appreciate the effort, whoever designed this

chart really tried to make it readable, but I think it's ultimately a failure.

It does take a lot of time to understand what's going on here.

So, if you have more than five dot points, more than five lines, it will be a mess.

You need to do something about it.

Maybe you need two charts, maybe you need to prioritize.

Maybe you need to say, okay, these are primary lines, these are secondary lines.

I will make them grey and invisible, I know, but

you need to do something about it.

Animation might help with complex charts.

You present one trend, then the second trend, then the third trend.

Yes, the result is a bit messy, but since you've guided your audience through

the points the end result is easier for them to digest.

So line charts, to conclude, please avoid the legend.

Please make sure the trend is visible.

This is the most important thing about line charts.

And five lines is the limit,

if you have more than five lines, you need to do something.

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