The Small Detail Detracting From Your Reports and Slides

You walk into a restaurant early on a Saturday night. All the other tables are empty, but there's plenty of staff around, ready for a busy shift. The place looks nice enough; clean, ready, nice decorations on the wall. But it just feels slightly, not right. There's something that feels haphazard here.

There are two types of people in the world:

1. Those that notice why it feels slightly off. You notice it's because the tablecloths are all slightly askew. The cutlery is asymmetrically placed. The tables are not aligned by a foot or two. You just know this will be a distraction to you all night now.
2. Those that don't know why it feels off. They just sense things aren't quite right and will feel distracted all night.

This is one of those situations, that when it's done perfectly, you don't notice and things just feel right. But done not quite right, just slightly haphazard and it is distracting from what you're there to do.

We have this same reaction when it comes to presentations and reports. The little details like alignment will niggle detail-focussed folk, and make the other folk just feel distracted.

It is so worth double-checking your reports and slides for these tiny details such as alignment. The best part is, aligning elements perfectly if you're designing in PowerPoint takes about 4 clicks.

Let's imagine you're trying to make a nice timeline of little boxes. It could be any shape or number of items, but it's my article, and I say it's a timeline. And it's an un-aligned mess.

Might be pretty crazy for "not quite aligned" but often when designing, I move bits out of the way quickly, and am often faced with this kind of pseudo-scatter-plot. In years gone by, I would have manually grabbed each box, in order starting at February, and carefully aligned it using the little dotted lines and microscopic mouse movements. You know how it looks, a bit like this:

But reasonably recently, PowerPoint has implemented a tool that does all this for you. In like, two clicks. To start with, you'll select all of the little boxes you want to align, and select "align to middle":

This slams them all to be in a nice line. Now, to get them evenly spaced, you can use the "distribute horizontally" function:

What you're left with after these few clicks (and certainly way less than the old man-handling method) is a perfect timeline:

It is evenly spaced. It is centred. All boxes are aligned. Even the most detailed eye will notice nothing here distracting.

And when you have important insights in your presentation, or a deliberate message in your report, you want nothing to distract your audience from hearing and understanding that. Remove all possible distractions, including little niggles like imperfect alignment.

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PS.. whenever you’re ready, here are some ways we can help you tell stories with your data and turn insights into business decisions - faster…

1. Grab a free copy of the ebook,?The Articulate Analyst, that provides actionable tips and quick wins in a simple and vibrant format.

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Growing up, Thomas Krafft wanted to be a pilot. He spent years getting his pilot's licence, sitting through 'death by PowerPoint' disguised as training.

Thousands of hours of experimenting, designing and delivering presentations later, Thomas found the small changes that make a big difference to reports and presentations.

Now, he passes these techniques on to others, helping them to present data and complex information in visually engaging presentations.

He lives in Brisbane where, as a keen environmentalist, he volunteers much of his time cleaning up the ocean and local waterways.