Room to Stretch
February 11, 2007 Filed in: Slide
Makeovers
I was looking something up on Dell's website a couple
of months ago and came across this graphic below. I
don't remember the context, but I saved the image
thinking, "This slide needs a makeover."
© Dell
This slide falls into the same trap as many charts. There is too much in too little space, and the slide becomes indecipherable from a distance. What we have here is basically a Gantt chart, which is used to illustrate start and finish dates of projects – support for versions of Windows in this case. The problem is that Gantt charts really need more horizontal space than a typical PowerPoint slide provides.
If you are using Keynote 3, you may be able to account for this space by using a wide-screen theme, but I chose a different route that should be usable to all Keynote and PowerPoint users.
This is actually made from two slides.
What I did was simply make the chart span across two standard 1024x768 slides. The tricky part is getting things to line up across slides. To simplify this process, I made the first slide. Then I copied the slide and pasted it in the slide navigator. Then I just adjusted the onscreen elements to reflect the second half of the chart. I removed any information that did not specifically pertain to Windows as well as text blurbs that I could just verbally explain or include in a handout. For the best effect, use Keynote's push transition to smoothly move from one slide to the next, reinforcing the feel that these two slides are one visual.
You might choose to discard or keep different information than I did, but think about this next time you have a large chart to include in your slides. Ask yourself if the information can span multiple slides to give you more room to work with and allowing you to create less cluttered, more readable slides.
Note: This method is not original to me. As a matter of fact, I got the idea from a sample clip on Keynote Theme Park, advertising their Keynote theme, The Plan. You can view the clip and see this idea in action right here.
© Dell
This slide falls into the same trap as many charts. There is too much in too little space, and the slide becomes indecipherable from a distance. What we have here is basically a Gantt chart, which is used to illustrate start and finish dates of projects – support for versions of Windows in this case. The problem is that Gantt charts really need more horizontal space than a typical PowerPoint slide provides.
If you are using Keynote 3, you may be able to account for this space by using a wide-screen theme, but I chose a different route that should be usable to all Keynote and PowerPoint users.
This is actually made from two slides.
What I did was simply make the chart span across two standard 1024x768 slides. The tricky part is getting things to line up across slides. To simplify this process, I made the first slide. Then I copied the slide and pasted it in the slide navigator. Then I just adjusted the onscreen elements to reflect the second half of the chart. I removed any information that did not specifically pertain to Windows as well as text blurbs that I could just verbally explain or include in a handout. For the best effect, use Keynote's push transition to smoothly move from one slide to the next, reinforcing the feel that these two slides are one visual.
You might choose to discard or keep different information than I did, but think about this next time you have a large chart to include in your slides. Ask yourself if the information can span multiple slides to give you more room to work with and allowing you to create less cluttered, more readable slides.
Note: This method is not original to me. As a matter of fact, I got the idea from a sample clip on Keynote Theme Park, advertising their Keynote theme, The Plan. You can view the clip and see this idea in action right here.