You will be able to simplify a chart so the audience sees its point in seconds.
The chart comes up on the screen. Twelve months along the bottom, five coloured lines across it, a legend in the corner with tiny swatches, gridlines every ten units, and data labels on every point. The speaker says, "As you can see," and the room cannot. Everyone is still trying to match colours to the legend.
Charts in talks fail for one reason more than any other: they show everything the data contains, when the audience only needs to see one thing. A chart for a report can afford detail, because the reader has time. A chart on a slide gets a few seconds of attention while you are talking. It has to make its point in that time.
Before you choose a chart type, ask what comparison you are making. Most charts in work talks make one of two.
Comparing categories, such as regions, products or teams, at one point in time? Use bars. Bars are easy to compare by length, and the eye reads them quickly. Horizontal bars work well when category names are long, because the labels fit without being tilted.
Showing change over time, such as monthly sales or weekly sign-ups? Use a line. A line shows direction and turning points at a glance. Twelve months of data as twelve separate bars can work, but a line usually makes the trend clearer.
Pie charts are popular and usually the weakest option for a slide. People find it hard to compare the sizes of slices, especially when there are more than two or three. If you want to show that one part is a large share of a whole, a single bar or a plain sentence with the number often does better.
Most charting software adds things by default: gridlines, borders, a legend, axis titles, data labels on every point, shadows, 3D effects. Start by removing all of them, then add back only what the audience needs to read the point.
Gridlines can usually go. If the exact value matters, label that one value directly. Legends force the eye to travel back and forth, so label each line or bar directly at its end instead. Axis titles can often be dropped if the headline and labels make the units clear. 3D effects distort the sizes of bars and slices, and add nothing.
Arjun's chart of missed appointments started with all of these. When he stripped it back, it was seven bars, one for each day of the week, with each bar's percentage written above it and nothing else.
Once the chart is clean, show the audience where to look. Put the one bar or line that carries your point in a strong colour, and make everything else a light grey.
Arjun coloured the Monday bar dark blue and left the other six in grey. Before anyone read a label, they knew the chart was about Monday. The grey bars still did a job: they showed the comparison, without competing for attention.
The same works for lines. If you are showing that one region fell while four others grew, make the falling line a strong colour and the other four grey. The audience sees the story first and the detail second.
Be careful with colour choices. Red and green together are hard to tell apart for people with the most common forms of colour blindness, so do not rely on that pair alone to carry the meaning. A strong colour against grey avoids the problem.
Finally, apply lesson 4.1, One idea per slide, stated in the headline, to the chart. The headline above it should say what the chart shows, as a sentence.
"Sales by region, FY2024" is a label. "East region sales fell while every other region grew" is a point. With the second headline and the east line highlighted, the audience reads the sentence, sees the line, and understands the slide in a couple of seconds. You can then spend your speaking time on why it happened and what to do about it.
Arjun's headline read: "Mondays lose almost twice as many appointments as any other day." Underneath it, the source in small type: booking system, January to June. Lesson 3.3, Say numbers people can understand, explained why that source line matters.
Look at the chart for five seconds, then look away and say what it showed. If you cannot say it in one sentence, the audience will not manage it either. Then ask someone else to do the same. If they say something different from your headline, the chart and the headline are not yet telling the same story.
The activity asks you to take one real chart from your own work and put it through every step above, ending with a headline that states what it shows.
Take one chart from your work, strip it back, highlight the key data, and write a headline that says what it shows.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).