Presentation Skills

A few months ago, I wrote a post on why PowerPoint is not to blame for bad presentations. In that post, I also promised to publish snippets from the book I’m writing on presentation skills with Columbia University Press. Turns…

This post was originally published on PresentationXpert blog. For people presenting scientific or technical information, there are often specific tables and numbers they wish to show: Descriptive data, summary statistics and regression results, for example. Sometimes those details need to…

As summer winds to a close, I find myself looking back at the presentations I gave over the past few months. In June alone, I gave nearly 20 different presentations: keynotes in large rooms (sometimes during lunch), seminar presentations in small…

Would you tighten a screw with a hammer? Cut your lawn with a pencil? Why not? Because it’s the wrong tool for the job! Every so often, someone writes a post about uninstalling Microsoft Excel from every computer because “it”…

Over the past few months, I’ve been developing this PowerPoint keyboard shortcut card. There are lots of places you can find libraries of PowerPoint keyboard shortcuts, including Nuts and Bolts Speed Training and Geetesh Bajaj at Indezine, but I wanted an easy-to-use,…

Announcing The Rad Presenters Podcast! I know some really rad presenters. One of the raddest in Stephanie Evergreen, which is why I’m absolutely thrilled to launch a brand new podcast with her. The Rad Presenters Podcast! Each episode we will…

Yesterday, I critiqued a revision of an existing slide deck where I claimed that some of the design choices and text elements could be significantly improved. As someone who spends time thinking, writing, and teaching how to give great presentations,…

A few weeks ago, I came across an older blog post describing a suggested redesign of a slide presentation. As someone interested in helping researchers and analysts improve their presentation slides, I felt that some of the redesign decisions were poorly…

This post originally appeared on the Urban Institute’s MetroTrends blog. One of the hot buzzwords in data visualization these days is “storytelling”: telling stories with data, using visualization to help tell stories,…stories, stories, stories. But no one, it seems, has…