"Presenters are usually guilty of including too much data in their on-screen charts," says Garr Reynolds, author of Presentation Zen. It's not that charts are bad in a PowerPoint presentation, but ...

When you want to visually imply growth, steps, directions, output or even a process, you might choose an arrow shape. Arrows are one of the most commonly used shapes in PowerPoint, and fortunately ...

You can manually create a custom Gantt chart from scratch using the native Chart menu of PowerPoint. In its Chart menu, you can find several types of standard charts including line, bar, area, pie, ...

PowerPoint will let you animate chart elements, but the option's not easy to find. If you don't know about it, you might not even go looking for it. You can animate just about anything in PowerPoint, ...

As two peas in the same Microsoft Office Suite pod, PowerPoint and Excel were built to work seamlessly with each other, including giving users the ability to cut from one and paste right into the ...

Numbers don't lie, but a bad chart decision makes it extremely difficult to understand what those numbers mean. Before you put together another PowerPoint presentation, make sure your pick the right ...

A data set that occurs frequently consists of the values or the percentage breakdown of several categories for two time periods. A common way of plotting these data is to use a pair of pie charts.

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I help people communicate data clearly with graphs. This article is more than 10 years old. This week I invited a guest blogger, ...