Using PowerPoint as a Presentation Dashboard
Dashboard Topic: Using PowerPoint as a Dashboard for your presention.
Dashboard Spy readers know how I like to take the long route to get to my point, so let’s discuss a little background material first, shall we? Let’s start with a quick discussion of dashboard design. A portlet-heavy dashboard home page is a design pattern commonly used by dashboard designers. Here is a screenshot of a typical dashboard page to show you what I mean. This particular dashboard is a sample done in Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer 10g, but the technology or dashboard software is not important. I’m showing just as an example of a dashboard page that is composed of a series of portlets. Take a look:
Very straight-forward as a design pattern, isn’t it? Simply a banner, a navigation unit (in this case, horizontal tabs), followed by a grouping of small windows that contain graphics. Each of those portlet windows contains a business metric or KPI that pertains to a specific business concern, call it a separate topic or business idea if you will.
Presenting a series of such portlet windows is a powerful user-centered navigation pattern as it allows for the dashboard user to pick a topic of interest and drill down to explore the details of that area.
Here is a simplified reprsentation of the dashboard page:
Nothing to it right? Well it is simple but yet allows for a smorgashboard style of navigation and dashboard drill-down that is very powerful. Users love it as it truly is user-centered. The dashboard presents intriguing areas to explore and the user decides what to click on.
Now I get to the point of today’s post about using PowerPoint as a Presentation Dashboard.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if your PowerPoint presentations were as user-centered in spirit and delivery as your dashboard? We’ll why can’t they? Instead of putting your audience through PowerPoint hell, why don’t you adopt that dashboard portlet homepage approach?
Look above at that simplified representation of the dashboard portlet page. Does it remind you of something? It should because you see it every time you create a PowerPoint presentation. Take a look at this screenshot of the slide view of a new PowerPoint presentation:
“So what?”, you may ask. Well here comes the punchline: Segment your presentation into chunks and ask your audience what they want you to cover. As they request different sections, use your PowerPoint presentation dashboard to navigate to those slides and conduct your presentation.
This idea came from a great post by the Beyond Bullets blog called “The Presentation Dashboard“. Here is a screenshot of the PowerPoint presentation dashboard spoken about in the post:
The slides 2, 4, 6 and 8 are purposely blank. This is to space out the sections of content represented by the graphics you see on pages 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9. Think of them as splash pages. If you ask the audience if they would like to start off with a review of the KPIs, then just click on the graph slide. The corresponding page will open in the presentation. You can go to show mode and away you go.
Using PowerPoint as a presentation dashboard is a neat idea, don’t you think?
Notes: The link given by the author of Beyond Bullets Cliff Atkinson is valuable. Here is The Torturous World of PowerPoint.
Did you know: The keeper of the site beyondbullets.com, noted author Cliff Atkinson, is coming out with a new version of Beyond Bullet Points? It should be really excellent. Look at his other books as well.
Tags: PowerPoint Dashboard, Presentation Dashboard, Dashboard Design, Business Intelligence, Microsoft PowerPoint Dashboards
