Our workWhy usPricing
Summit

Ignite: How to Spark Creativity and Build Resilience

Join us for 3+ hours of free content with 5 sessions on sparking creativity and building resilience, featuring 12+ industry experts from Headspace, Webflow, Zapier, Reddit, Coursera, Clari, DirecTV, MasterControl, Matterport, and more.
View event
Gather & Grow

Your Opinion About Your Brand Doesn’t Matter

Watch our interactive session on how to position, build and experiment your way to a brand that resonates with your audience!
View event
Gather & Grow

Zero-click Content | On-Demand Recording

Watch the full session with Amanda Natividad about content quality, social listening, content trends in 2023, and how to leverage zero-click content!
View event
Events & Summits

Explore all the content inside Events & Summits!

See all
BlogCommunityBook a demoSign in

7 Tricks for Data Visualization in PowerPoint

Team Superside
Team Superside6 min read
7 Tricks for Data Visualization in PowerPoint - Superside

Aside from following Skyscraper-construction, charts and graphs is one of my guilty pleasures. This does not make me an outlier in Superside. Our CEO Fredrik Thomassen is, by a reasonable estimation, even more hooked. One of his main social innovations is a long-running messenger group where people share interesting charts.

I love graphs because they add constraints to data that make it honest and conducive to telling a big picture-story in factual terms. While a graph will certainly have a perspective in what it chooses to highlight—the period shown and the axes and filters used—it usually displays these for all to see.

Additionally, using beautifully designed graphs and reports improves almost any presentation. It adds insight and understanding by putting your message into a surrounding context. It increases credibility, is a comfortable visual break, and is conducive to succinct storytelling.

mPGVFLZuiO9N_HWc5nnN7c6LuxtqQHMli7lut

Seems about right

Graphs are great because they graphically convey factual information quickly. They are high-resolution stories with much stronger constraints than other formats. And while it is possible to lie with statistics, I find that it is both harder to do and easier to spot than with a story or a picture.

mPGVFLZuiO9N_Te9gpTqhzWeWgyM7BvPVQNTL

Misleading perhaps, but also easy to spot.

Whether for pure curiosity or because I need to build an argument, I often find myself searching for graphs or other visual data to check the validity of something I assume or heard. As anyone who's made a PowerPoint presentation knows, a graph is a must-have visual tool in almost any presentation. Here are seven tricks to finding and creating visual data for your presentations the next time you need some great graphs.

1. Google Image Search

Google image search is usually an excellent place to start looking, but what you find is essentially second-hand graphs—graphs someone else made related to your topic.

The reason I often start here is that usually another researcher has collected, cleaned up and presented the exact data I want to present. Plus, it has the added benefit of quickly introducing me to different views and various angles on the subject that I hadn’t considered.

mPGVFLZuiO9N_w4ksjIm24qIRnY5VKyEQMzOP

Nothing shouts research like obsolete second-hand graphs.

2. Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha is my second stop. It's where I go when I can't easily find graphs elsewhere. Wolfram Alpha is different in that it generates graphs based on the query you send. It trawls through mountains of information from unstructured sources, like books, and aggregates it into something that answers your question.

A downside of using Wolfram Alpha is that you may have a high failure rate. While this is becoming gradually better over time, you should expect to have to make some trials before you get a hit. I often find myself leaving empty-handed.

mPGVFLZuiO9N_8cBuZzhQATPZB2sb0N9iWfuE

As usual not quite usable, but a great concept nonetheless.

3. Search in Google Topic + Table / Graph / Data / Infographics

If a Google Image Search and Wolfram don’t get me anywhere, then I start looking at secondary data to build the graph myself. The easiest way to start is, again, a simple Google search.

The most useful results are:

  • Scientific research from Google Scholar. These usually show up on top, and have factual, proven information by excellent sources. This is the best way to encounter scholarly data that has not been widely publicized before.
  • Primary data from credible sources. Science-related, data-heavy publications, like the Economist, and survey organizations, like Pew or Gallup, hold useful information for graphs.
  • Interpretations from credible blogs. Specifically, blogs written by scientists and professors in the subject. They often also include an interpretation of the data that can be illuminating.

mPGVFLZuiO9N_VzILempKCL2H41vOrThxU3AT

A Google search of the topic and keyword.

4. Google Public Data

If even that doesn’t yield results, then that means that the quick-and-easy options are out, and you have to start getting your hands dirty.

The simplest place to start when it comes to selecting the data and filters yourself is Google public data. It has a collection of most of the biggest public data sets available. This includes sources like the World Bank, Eurostat, IMF, WTO, US Census Bureau, OECD, and many more.

What's absolutely terrific about this tool is how quick it is if you have some vague ability to discern who is most likely to have the data you need. With just a few clicks on filters, you get a beautiful chart instantly. And changing the period to the years you need, or changing formats to bar charts or maps, is similarly simple.

Superside's research team is skilled in public data searching and can help find information that will seamlessly fit into any chart or graph.

mPGVFLZuiO9N_5impSUHzwOXlCEIwPm8BaorR

The world is doing surprisingly well.

If I want to really underline a factual point, this is the place I go. I especially recommend trying the comparison graph. It presents comparison charts, where you can easily select the countries you want to highlight (as shown below). You can then press the play button to see it evolve over time, a trick Google learned from the previous go-to place for such graphs: GapMinder.

mPGVFLZuiO9N_LFz7ScsTMPAu4XkSYAjB38KH

I thought India was an IT-hub?

The Future of DesignOps eBook

Facebook, Airbnb and Pinterest all have DesignOps teams to efficiently manage the creative process, but it’s not a one-size fits all solution. Learn about this emerging role in our eBook!

Download the eBook

5. SlideShare

For those times where you don’t quite know what you’re looking for, Slideshare is an option that allows you to search for another presentation made about a certain topic. For most topics, someone, somewhere, created a presentation on the topic and uploaded it on SlideShare.

While the quality varies, you can find some true gems. Even if you don’t use it, I always find it useful just to see some graphs, perspectives or interpretations that might be valuable to look at.

mPGVFLZuiO9N_FEKATERxCLjgH3uDyQoKc09w

6. Reddit / Data is Beautiful

Another step away from search towards discovery is one of my favorite Reddit communities: Data is Beautiful. This is a community of graph nerds who produce and collect interesting data visualizations for each other.

While this resource is seldom useful for actual fact finding, it can be a wonderful place to find things to care about in the first place. Using Reddit’s algorithm for crowd evaluations of a graph, you will find many visualizations here that may not be relevant, but certainly are interesting.

mPGVFLZuiO9N_QqW3uJNcs7cFK8Aaq0nmJAyL

An example of a spurious correlation from r/dataisbeautiful

7. Our World in Data

This project by Max Roser at Oxford University is a great place to find “big picture” graphs that tell a compelling story. The kind of thing you put in the beginning of your presentation to “set the stage” that may or may not connect to the rest of your presentation. Many of the graphs you have seen too many times had their origins here.

Unlike most other places that produce share-worthy, fascinating graphs, Roser is diligent in using credible sources and representing data honestly.

mPGVFLZuiO9N_7pvt5CZ2taMWibkKo5IgW4GM

30 million base pairs for the price of a cheeseburger

Once your research is complete, contact Superside and delegate your graphic design needs.

Published: Aug 10, 2017
Team Superside
Written by
Team Superside
Team Superside is comprised of writers from all over the globe. We love making stuff, telling stories and sharing fun, nerdy ideas with the world.

Join our community of 15,000 strong and receive the best design and marketing content, biweekly

No charge. Unsubscribe anytime

Continue reading

Hassle-free design starts here

Superside is an always-on design company that makes design frictionless and hassle-free for marketing, sales, creative and product design teams. This means top-quality designs at lightning-fast speeds, improved velocity and go-to-market and completely secure and confidential file sharing and collaboration.

In this one-on-one live demo, you’ll see:
- How Superside works
- A first look at the Superside platform
- The most suitable subscription plan for you

Get ready to join 450+ scale-ups and enterprise teams doing good design at scale with Superside’s dedicated team model.
Ready to get started?Book a demo now

Book a call with us

Loading...
We need your phone number for the demo. We'll never use it for any other purposes.
Superside is a revolutionary way for businesses to get good design done at scale.Trusted by 450+ ambitious companies, Superside makes design hassle-free for marketing and creative teams. By combining the top 1% of creative talent from around the world with purpose-built technology and the rigor of design ops, Superside helps ambitious brands grow faster. Since inception, Superside has been a fully remote company, with more than 700 team members working across 57 countries and 13 timezones.
© 2023 Superside. All rights reserved.