See how to integrate legends into your statistical graphs
An easy way of improving the look of your chart, and making it more
readable and easily understandable, is to take advantage of the PowerPoint
drawing tools.
As clearly explained at point 6) "Integrate the legend", a
good Information Design strategy that can be applied to most graphs is the
one of dropping the default legend and to build and integrate a custom one
within the chart elements.
To turn off the default legend in the first place, you can either turn
off its icon on the chart toolbar or click on the legend itself and press
the [Del] key.
Without the standard legend, you will need to find an alternative way
of communicating what data your chart represents.
Click once on the slide (anywhere outside the chart area) and you will
display the normal PowerPoint interface. At the bottom of the slide you
will see the Drawing toolbar.
You can now click on the "Text box" icon and insert text
boxes on top of the chart. If you have a pie chart, you could place the
labels that would replace directly the legend on the pie slices themselves.
If you have bars the text boxes will have to fit directly on the bars. In
case you have vertical columns, you can create text boxes and rotate them
90 degrees by using the "Rotate and Flip" feature under the
"Draw" menu.
By applying these text boxes on top of the chart elements, you create
an integrated legend that will replace the old one. Furthermore, there's
no need to label all the bars or columns, since the ones related to the
same data series will have the same color.
You can create text boxes to be placed outside of the bars or slices,
and you can draw lines and connectors to link the text boxes to the
chart's elements.
Text boxes can be used also to quote the source of the data and the
measurement unit used in the chart. You can easily rotate any text box
from "Draw" >> "Rotate or flip".
Lines can also be used to replace the standard gridlines. A nice effect
is to use horizontal lines that have the same color of the background and
place them on top of the columns. There will not be too much ink on the
chart - according to the "data-ink ratio" principle - since
these lines will not have any color. Nonetheless, they will split the
columns at regular intervals, helping the audience to figure out the
values of the data.
If you want to highlight a specific data series or a value, you can use
the regular drawing tools:
- a rectangle or a circle, with no fill color and a thick red or orange
border, can easily draw the attention of your audience.
- a rectangle with the same size and shape of a column or a bar can
easily be applied on top of the column we want to stress. In this case you
can remove the line color from this rectangle (choose "No Line")
and you can use a "semitransparent" color (just tick the
appropriate box when you choose the color).
- a simple arrow or similar shape can be added to point at the data you
want the attention to focus on.
There's no limit to what your fantasy can do just by taking advantage
of all of the PowerPoint drawing tools available.
You can read this article in the original issue of MasterView.
