Presenting Business Data with PowerPoint

Often the ability to think about data and the ability to effectively communicate are considered separate skillsets. This course focuses on harmonizing the two skills into one essential skillset.

The first step in understanding how powerful PowerPoint can be is learning how to use the basic tools at your disposal. In this course, you'll do just that, discovering how to create slides, add text, shapes and tables to them, and where to go to begin your customization journey. By the end of this course, you should have a strong foundation in what is possible with PowerPoint and know how to begin building your first presentation with the application.

Data analysis can return a wealth of insight and information, but unless you display those findings in an engaging way, you may find it hard to convince your audience. Adding visuals to your presentation will help ensure your messages land. In this course, you'll learn how to add basic visuals to your deck, varying how and when you display your most important data.

Charts are some of the most accessible visual tools we can use when illustrating data, but their impact depends on the type we select. When we use the wrong chart type for our message, we risk confusing our audience and losing their attention. To avoid this, we must understand each chart type and when to apply it.

In this project, you are the finance manager of a medtech called Alert Accelerator. You’ve been asked to present a round up of the company’s performance to senior management. You’ll select and design impactful charts to illustrate the findings you’d like to share.

Charts are some of the most accessible visual tools we can use when illustrating data, but their impact depends on the type we select and how well we build it into our presentation. If our charts contain bad design habits, we risk confusing our audience and losing their attention. To avoid this, we must understand how to make an impact with the build of our charts.

Template customization design is crucial when building PowerPoint presentations as it allows the presenter to create a visually appealing and consistent design that aligns with their brand and messaging. A well-designed template can help the audience focus on the content, improve readability, and make the presentation more engaging and memorable.

One of the greatest challenges when presenting in front of an audience is maintaining their attention. Adding interactivity to slides can help with this. In a business setting, we can do this by adding subtle transitions and animations, through audience participation, or by engaging with live camera feeds. In this course, we'll explore how to hold your audience's attention and stave off fatigue.

The presentations that engage their audience are built on a strong structure and comprehensively deliver on intention. How you built your insights into your structure will determine just how impactful your presentation can be. In this course, you'll learn how to determine your audience, intention, structure, content, before stepping back to assess its accessibility and accuracy.

The final step of presenting data-driven insights to an audience is its physical delivery, whether that be virtually or in person. PowerPoint offers many presenting tools and commands that can help maintain presenter credibility from start to finish.