Displaying More Complex Data
I'm going to take a brief break in the sacred cow series to address something that came up in my 9-to-5. It was one of those situations where it was clear there was a need for a better solution, but it wasn't obvious exactly what that solution was. This did not involve presentation slides, but it is no less relevant to similar situations that happen to involve slides.
I was asked to review a report on an evaluation of some solutions against a list of criteria. At the end was a chart much like this one to the right. (The data in this and all following examples are not the same as what I encountered (for hopefully obvious reasons), but should be similar enough in concept to be illustrative.) As you can see, even when you click on the chart to see the full-sized version, it's unreadable. The story that the chart is trying to tell isn't at all obvious and it takes far too much effort just to read it, data point by data point. There had to be a better way.
Remembering what I learned from Edward Tufte, I suggested that perhaps this is a situation where a data table would actually be more appropriate. However, I also added that we might want to use some color to help convey the story rather than make the reader make heads or tails of 64 numbers that look similar enough to visually blend in together.
What I got back was something like this. By this time, we didn't have time to continue to tackle the problem and it was a valiant effort on their part, but this too had its problems. On the positive side, there was good color contrast to visually separate the values qualitatively. However, what hurt this design was how the text was unreadable in some colors. Changing the text colors in the red and green cells only probably would not have helped the readability either. There was also the issue, in my mind, of too many qualitative distinctions. The scale wasn't logical, but adjusting the scale with the four qualities intact didn't improve things either.
Since there was no more time to make modifications, this is what we were left with. What I did do, though, was to tackle this problem as an academic exercise.
The first changes I made were to change the number of quality distinctions from four (Great, Good, OK, Bad) to three (Good, Acceptable, Poor) and try to make the text more readable. To make the numbers easier to read, I got rid of the colored cell backgrounds and instead applied the color to the text. To keep the reader from getting lost in the data, I used alternating shading for the rows, a subtle, but effective technique. What I had now was better, but still could use improvement.
The next change I made was simple, but yet yielded a much easier to read data table. I split the categories up into groups of four. This could represent groupings of categories or it could merely be a visual break; a chunking of data, if you will. Breaking data up into manageable chunks makes it easier for the reader to consume and remember the data you're providing.
Now, this seemed to be a workable solution. I then asked myself what other ways I could realize the same or better effect. At this moment, I remembered the well known and higly effective tables that are found throughout Consumer Reports magazines. Sometimes they contain data and sometimes they just contain symbols. These symbols could take the place of the colored text to provide a more meaningful table. This next version contained my variation of this technique. I created symbols similar in concept to those in the famous magazine and placed them along with the data, which are now in a simple black typeface.
My next thought was, "What if the raw data is not necessary for this given audience? What if the high-level meaning or importance of the values needs to be conveyed and not the values themselves? What we have now is a table with just the symbols and no data, save for the total values at the bottom. Now, instead of giving the reader a whole lot to read and consider, we're giving them what's important to them: the simplified significance of the values.
You can, of course, apply the chunking of the data to these symbols as well. These symbols are information to be consumed just as the raw data was.
The lesson from this whole exercise was that you should always consider and reconsider how you display your data. Consider an approach that is different than what you would normally take. Put yourself in your reader's or audience's shoes and don't stop improving it until it has the effectiveness that you would expect it to have.
Make Your Data Pop
Think what you will of him or his opinions, but Glenn Beck was the stereotypical presenter sharing data in tabular format on slides.
Some slides were more effective than others and some highlighted the perils of adding bullets after bullets or even rows after rows. You're forced to shrink the text and the message gets lost in the delivery.
Now, no matter what your data is, even if it has little economic, political, or scientific importance, it's critical to never manipulate the data. What you can and should do is format the data so that not only is it as truthful as it is in its rawest form, but that the underlying message is brought out more clearly.
With that said, let's look at a recreation of one of the slides he showed:
Within the wall of text, there's a message in there somewhere. OK, 13% believe that if you earn between $151,000 and $250,000, you're rich. Fine. Does that mean those same people think that if you earn outside that range, say $269,000, you're not rich? Of course not. That's a given, logically. Being "rich" is a state of positive wealth. You're not less rich if you're more wealthy. It's just impossible. It's a conclusion that couldn't be honestly debated even by the most semantically-obsessed individuals. Here's the key: If you're going to draw conclusions from the raw data, make sure you're on solid ground. If the data and conclusions were presented in a meeting or conference, provide the raw data in the handouts. Not only does it free the presentation from slides that make the audience work too hard to decipher, but it gives you a certain amount of transparency that shows you didn't monkey with the data to force it into the conclusion that you desired.
So, our first step is to get the data out of the table and into a chart. Since we're dealing with percentages, a pie chart is the way to go.
The pie chart using the data from the table really doesn't tell us anything that the table doesn't already tell us. It just gives the numbers a visual sense of scale. However, watching the video clip (starting at 4:41), Glenn makes his point that 20% of those polled thought those making $251,000 or more are rich. Well, based on the logic we observed above, that's not true. What we have here is not only a poorly designed slide, but an inability to read a data table.
If you apply the logic that anyone who thinks that someone making anywhere less than $251,000 is rich would also think that someone making $501,000 or more is rich, then you can create the following chart:
If you speak to Glenn's statement regarding the number of people who thought you're rich if you make more than $251,000, then you'd have the following chart:
That's a different percentage than he gave, isn't it? Well, as I said, he apparently has trouble reading data tables. What we have here as well is a slide that makes the point he was trying to make much more clearly and with more impact. Applying the same logic to the other poll answers yields:
If you want to make your data really pop and help you drive your message home, consider and focus on your message. Display the data in a way that reinforces your message, yet maintains the integrity and fidelity of the data.
SlideRocket: A Review
A while back, when Googling for a PowerPoint alternative (competition is good for consumers, and Microsoft too), I stumbled upon SlideRocket. The concept was intriguing. An online service that provided an alternative to PowerPoint and even Keynote, allows you to share your slide decks online, and even deliver them remotely in a meeting. What's more, since it uses Flash and AIR, the decks can be viewed offline. Even better, they offered a 30-day free trial with which to try it out. Given all of this, I felt it would be foolish of myself not to give it a go.
Features
SlideRocket gives you a copious amount of features that you would expect to see in a PowerPoint alternative while also providing features that you would not expect, but after some reflection, fall in the category of, "well, duh!" You can import existing Powerpoint documents into SlideRocket or create your own within their Flash-driven interface. Unfortunately, if you're a Keynote user, SlideRocket doesn't support your documents. Your only option is to export your slide deck to PowerPoint first. With how SlideShare now supports Keynote, this is a pretty glaring omission, in my opinion. Because it's Web-based, you can access your slides from anywhere, as long as you have an Internet connection. Also, as I mentioned before, because they leverage AIR, you can even download a copy of your slide deck and use it offline. The catch is this will not work on the free account.
If you are in the need of stock photography, you can access images from fotolia and flickr directly from within the interface. If you're using other people's flickr photos, you can even restrict your search to those in the creative commons. One word of caution, though. If you intend to use your slides commercially, then the flickr search built into SlideRocket isn't restrictive enough. You'll still have to find the photos you need the old-fashioned way. With that said, this integration with image sources on the Web is powerful and can be a huge time saver. Hopefully, they'll integrate with more stock photography sources in the future. It also appears as though they will be adding the ability to access icons, templates, stock audio, fonts, and cartoons in the future. The only other service online at the moment is to have special printings of your slide deck done through Mimeo.
Taking a page from services such as SlideShare, you can share your slides with the world (found under "Publish," not "Share.") through either a direct link or embedded in a Web page. Graduating from the free to either the individual or business accounts will give you more options, including restricting who has access and removing the SlideRocket branding.
Business accounts give you additional capabilities including the ability to have a team work on the slides with multiple users available in the business account. You can even set permissions for each user. You can deliver your slides to remote members of a meeting as well, with you as the presenter in full control of the slides. Additionally, you can access metrics on you slide decks, seeing how many people viewed your slides and how long they spent on each slide. Now, if you're giving a presentation, the slide can't really stand on their own anyway, so you may find some of the features useful and some not so.
Pricing
For the feature set they promise, the cost of using SlideRocket seems fairly reasonable. You get the basics at no cost with two at-a-cost options. $10/month will give you more features than the free version and $20/user/month will give you the full suite of features.
The Test Drive
For my evaluation of SlideRocket, I created a PowerPoint document to serve as my control in this little experiment. I encourage you to look at the original document so that you can get a clear glimpse of what they're supposed to look like. If you've read my earlier post on chart design, then you should recognize many of the slide and the subject matter I used to come up with them. I then created two slide decks on SlideRocket. One was an import of my PowerPoint slides and the other was an attempt to recreate those slides as faithfully as possible with only the SlideRocket tools. The slides are generally how one should not design slides, though my intent was to look at features used quite often in slides that either I create or I am subjected to. Among the features & effects I included in the test are:
- Blocks of text
- Bullets (gag)
- Gradual build of bullets
- Shapes
- Bar charts
- Pie charts
- Charts with an alternative background color
- Embedding images
- Embedding images full bleed
- Embedding video
- Multiple shapes, including varying fill options
Importing A Slide Deck
Epic Fail
The process for importing a slide deck was easy enough. They even give you two options for importing. One is to import the slides as images and the other is to convert them from PowerPoint slides to SlideRocket slides. When attempting to import them as images, I was greeted with an error message when the process failed. I'm not sure what in the slide it couldn't handle, but when you look at the original deck, there's nothing outrageous.
I next imported the slides to be converted into the SlideRocket format. This type of import as a little more successful. That is, I didn't get any errors. What I can't say, however, is that it went without a hitch.
The first thing I noticed is that the font sizes were not respected. This seemingly simple effect, font size, was too much for the import. Everything on the title slide was shrunken down to 18 (point I assume). It also had difficulty with text inside drawing objects. Though the font was preserved, it too was reduced in size.
SlideRocket handled JPEGs well, at least those used as slide backgrounds. Additionally, it did give provide one feature I wish PowerPoint had: the ability to extract a slide background for use elsewhere.
Drawing objects were a mixed bag. SlideRocket converted the thought balloon and donut to rectangles and the pattern fill (which I wish people wouldn't use) used in one rectangle was lost. In the last slide of the deck, I threw a lot of drawing objects at SlideRocket, with the intent of uncovering redrawing of the diagram should it have any issues. With the exceptions just mentioned, it handled the import fairly well.
Charts were a mixed bag as well, though more risky, it seems, than the drawing objects. The bar charts were converted to images that didn't appear to be the right size and/or scale because the text and numbers show signs of disproportionate scaling. With these charts imported as images, all hope is lost of editing them without reimporting a replacement slide or recreating the chart within SlideRocket. The pie chars fared much worse with text labels being cut off, and the legend getting carved up. The pie charts themselves were also skewed oddly and moved to the far left edge of the slide. The line chart fared much better, though the legend in this chart was sliced nearly in half, just like the others. The moral of the story: if you have charts that you want to import, don't. If the charting capabilities of SlideRocket doesn't give you what you need, then save your chart as a graphic first and then import that.
PowerPoint 2004 has a nasty habit of flagging PNG files as needing QuickTime and a decompressor. Every other software package and project that uses images can support these files. However, in true Microsoft fashion, they fail to support open standard they themselves don't own (MPEG-4 video is another). My question during this evaluation was, "can SlideRocket see this PNG for what it really is and display it?" The answer: no. If they're using Microsoft libraries on the back-end, then this result should come as no surprise. With the color depth of JPEG, the losslessness of GIF, and transparency support far superior to GIF, there is no good or justifiable reason for Microsoft to not support PNG properly.
PowerPoint has the same problem with QuickTime movies (MPEG-4). Again, a standard they don't own, and thus don't support. Now in this case, Microsoft isn't the only one to blame. It's at this point that I stumbled upon a limitation of SlideRocket. All video that you import needs to be Flash Video (FLV). I'll cover this some more later.
Builds within a slide also did not make it through the import. On the slide with the iPhone screenshot, the two bullets are supposed to appear one at a time. This was not preserved.
In summary, when importing PowerPoint slides, you do so at your own risk. Expect to redo elements of most of your slides and the entirety of many others. Lack of Keynote support is also a huge downer.
The final imported product:
Creating A Slide Deck From Scratch
One of the selling points of SlideRocket is how it is an alternative to PowerPoint and Keynote altogether. Thus, the next part of my evaluation was an attempt to recreate the slide deck from scratch. Though SlideRocket bills itself as an alternative to Keynote, my using it as an alternative requires more than just copying some build effects and slide transitions. If it's not as easy (or easier) to use as Keynote, then it's got a hard sell.
As a design tool, SlideRocket lacks a lot of what the standard tools have, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Presenters need to show more restraint anyway and tools that force a little bit of that restraint are doing a service (think Keynote's chart palettes). However, ease of use should be something that's just nice to have, but rather it should be a functional requirement. This is where I feel SlideRocket comes up short. The toolbar to the left is a nice touch, but the properties panels to the right took quite a bit of getting used to. The library link on the bottom isn't your asset library (which I can't seem to learn), it's your slide library. Keep in mind that you don't have any slides in there unless you explicitly add them to your library. The menus at the top are particularly annoying to me. As a Mac user, I have certain user experience expectations. The design of the menu system, however, has its own expectations: that I'm a Windows user. To be on a Mac and forced to deal with Windows user interface conventions was quite jarring. The copy and paste keyboard commands that I expect to work don't. I have to constantly remind myself (they think I'm using Windows. It's Ctrl, not Command. Worse yet, the copy and paste was not responsive many of the times and I often found myself pasting what I copied previously, not what I just copied (or thought I did).
SlideRocket does offer a modest selection of simple slide templates. Fortunately, they don't hit you with a bunch of horrendously complex templates like some applications *cough*PowerPoint*cough*. The five they do offer, all-white, all-black, a gradient theme similar in concept to what Apple uses in their keynotes (small k), "Elegant" (a lighter gray gradient theme, and "Ripple," which I think we can all do without. In the future, they'll be adding the ability to share themes and layouts with other SlideRocket users.
Adding new slides is fairly simple, with it giving you the layout of the last slide you created as a default. Using the panel to the right, you can change it to five other layouts if you wish:
- Title slide
- Text (think default PowerPoint "you know you want to use bullets!" slide layout)
- Title only
- Blank
- Picture - horizontal
- Picture - vertical
Adding elements is fairly easy and is the best part of the UI. Click an icon and often either the appropriate drawer slides out or you're presented with an asset library. Text boxes are simple to add, for example. However, once you need to modify properties, you're faced with a rather confusing properties panel with some odd UI conventions that either don't seem to make sense or just don't seem to work, period.
There's a decent amount of shapes available that can be drawn to the slide. Again, the properties panels to the right leave a lot to be desired. A LOT; as in, you can't do squat. Come to think of it, instead of complaining about the panels each time I cover a feature, let me make it clear right here: they suck. They're so bad, it's one of the main reasons why I felt very limited when using SlideRocket and why I felt frustrated with how I was unable to bend it to my will. The manipulation of shapes and positioning and formatting of them was torture. Add to this the copy+paste issues I mentioned earlier, and suffice it to say, I was relieved when I was finally done. If given a choice next time, I'd rather choose waterboarding.
Adding images worked well. To be honest, with the exception of the asset library, it's hard to screw this up. With that said, I did like the way they implemented the asset library. It's also from here where you can access image sources such as Fotolia and flickr.
My attempt at adding video left me, well, sad. I knew I had trouble when I tried to upload my short QuickTime movie and it didn't want to let me select any. It would have been better, much better, if SlideRocket let me know up front that Flash Video and only Flash Video can be used. This left me in a bit of a quandary since I don't have any software that I'm aware of to convert my movie to FLV. After a while spent on Google, I came across Zamzar, a free service that will convert your movies to any one of many different formats. Using Zamzar, I was able to convert my QuickTime movie to Flash Video and upload it to SlideRocket. I really wish SlideRocket was more upfront with this restriction as it's one that will surely leave many people quite puzzled.
Wrong Colors
Shapes left me mad, images made me happy, video left me sad, and charts, well charts just plain old let me down. Knowing that SlideRocket is built in Flash and that Flash is a vector-based application, I held quite a bit of hope in their chart capabilities. Alas, it was not to be. Bar charts were quite limiting. I could not choose between data labels or the Y-axis. I got the Y-axis, whether I wanted it or not. Where it put the labels also failed to impress. You had the choice of outside (only if the bars didn't go to the top) or inside and inside meant dead-center. You couldn't isolate individual data points for their own color in the way that would be easiest, but even using the Keynote method leaves unimpressive results.
Pie charts had their own frustrations. For example, SlideRocket's chart's legend is ridiculously small. There's no way on this green earth that anyone in the back of a conference room could read the legend. Also, when you change the start angle so that you can more intelligently orient the slices, SlideRocket conveniently forgets your stated intentions and reverts it back to what it's default to as soon as you move away from the slide.
Where's My Data?
Line graphs were nothing short of amazing; utterly amazing in their ability to trash the visual display of my data. Not only did it fail to use the line colors I chose for the data series, but in the final product, data points that it still maintains fail to show up on the chart at all. You better hope your data points don't go something like 48, 34,0,25,0. That 25 will not show up on the chart whatsoever.
The final product, built within SlideRocket:
Remote Delivery
One of the enticing points of SlideRocket is the ability to drive the slides while your audience, located anywhere in the world, can listen to your presentation (over the phone, Skype, etc.). I tried this out on my computer using two different browsers to simulate the presenter and audience and it worked well. I rehearsed several times in the conference room where I was due to present (a different slide deck than these examples, of course) without a hitch. I even was able to use my presentation remote just fine.
Come show time, SlideRocket failed me miserably. When attempting to advance to the second slide, the second window that had the slide playing went to the back, giving me the the regular SlideRocket interface. To make matters worse, the moment that happened, Safari froze solid. The only thing I could do was move the mouse and do a hard reset. Even command-option-escape didn't work. Fortunately, I had rehearsed enough so that I could keep going and get the remote folks back up to speed quickly once I rebooted and relaunched Skype and the SlideRocket deck. This surely didn't give me confidence that SlideRocket was indeed ready for prime time. It's too bad it waited until then to teach me that lesson.
Summary
SlideRocket is a service whose concept genuinely has promise. Unfortunately, in my opinion, it just fails to deliver on many counts. The ability to embed full-featured slide decks in a Web page, a fail-safe mechanism when presenting on the road, integration with online services such as Fotolia and flickr, and an alternative to the software out there now make SlideRocket and services like it something I'd like to see succeed. However, the UI frustrations, limitations, and broken charting functionality make the extra effort to create slides in SlideRocket an effort I would rather not undertake. If they can fix these problems, I would love to give it another thorough review because as I said, based on what they promise, I'd like to see them succeed. However, they first need to deliver on those promises.
Improve Your Slide’s Charts
Types of slides that we often create are those that try to present data to our audience. All too often, this data is placed in a cluttered data table or worse, is presented in a narrative format. In most cases, a chart of some sort is the appropriate method of presenting data. However, there is an art to doing it right. A poorly formatted chart can be just as bad as that useless narrative on the screen.
In my experience, I've seen far more bad charts than effective ones. Often, the reason is expedience or because someone decided "hey, this looks cool!" An exotic sports car with a broken transmission may look very cool, but it's not going to get anywhere. Likewise, a poorly thought-out chart may look cool, but it's useless without an explanation.
We've got 3 seconds for that chart to convey its information in support of our story.
When creating a chart, the first thing we need to ask ourselves is, "what is the most important information?" The key words there are "most important" and "information." Information and data are not the same. Data are the raw numbers and figures. There's nothing more to them. Information is the message or story being told by the data. Data by itself will not translate into information. What we do to the data will provide us with information.
Secondly, we need to focus on which information is most important. Depending on how you present your data, the information will be different. I'm sure you've heard the phrase, "Lies, lies, and damned statistics." Well, it's true. How you manipulate or present data affects the message being presented. Let's look at two charts that contain the same data, but because of a different presentation, tell a different story.
Bad Pie Chart
For this example, I took the number of level 80 characters is one of my World of Warcraft guilds and created two different charts. The data is exactly the same in each. In the pie chart, the data is represented as percentages of the total while in the bar chart, the data is represented by the raw numbers. The message contained within both, while truthful, are misleading. In the pie chart, you have a large number of slices that well crammed into one chart minimizes the difference between them. Though you can interpret correctly that there are twice as many druids as there are warlocks, the visual and mental effort required to get there is more than is necessary. Without the labels, all we can do is guess at the relative values. In addition, since all we see are percentages (fractions of one whole pie), we lack any information about the size of the guild.
Keynote Bar Chart (before)
The bar chart tells a completely different story. Here, you've got a more apparent representation of the relative class populations. Is the chart poorly formatted? You bet. I'll get to that in a moment. However, in this example, it's immediately apparent that the warlock population is very small. A simple glance and the two bars tells that story in 3 seconds or less.
Bar Charts
Now, with that said, the relative populations of each of the classes is not what my most important information was. The information I wanted to convey was the population of death knights, added to World of Warcraft this past November, relative to to the other classes. The other bar chart example, this time from PowerPoint also fails to convey this information. In both the Keynote and PowerPoint examples, the chart settings were left mostly to their defaults. Below are the major problems with these charts:
PowerPoint Bar Chart (before)
- 3D In this example, PowerPoint's default is to present a 3D chart. The problem with 3D bar charts is that they lie to us. They give the bars more surface area than is necessary, and which is often out of proportion with reality, especially for the smaller bars. Take for example, the same chart displaying data for one of my other guilds. This chart has two bars with a value of 0, yet they have surface area. Thus, visually, these two bars appear to have value when in fact they don't.
- Inappropriate Title These charts are titled, "Classes - D'Gentlemen." Though it is true that these charts are displaying the number of level 80 characters in D'Gentlemen, sorted by class, that's not the most important information. What's most important is the number of death knights relative to the other classes.
PowerPoint Bar Chart #2
- Bar Colors Obscure the Message When displaying multiple data points, it's not necessary to always give them their own color. Remember, what's most important in these charts isn't each bar relative to the other 9. What's most important is the value of one specific bar relative to the other 9.
- Sort Order Obscures the Message When displaying multiple data points, be mindful of the sort order. Sorting them alphabetically doesn't always make sense. Reordering the bars by value (alphabetically as a secondary sort) drives home to the audience the relative population of death knights in a manner that takes very little visual effort. The eyes don't have to bounce all around the chart to put all the pieces together.
Keynote Bar Chart (after)
- Chart Junk Edward Tufte refers to the stuff on a chart that doesn't add value to the chart "chart junk." In this case, the border of the chart, the grid lines, legends, and the numbers down the left all contribute to a data:ink ratio that is out of whack. None of that contributes to the easy absorption of the data. Because of limitations of presentation slide software and the nature of the data, our best option here is to place the value of the data points right there on the bars.
PowerPoint Bar Chart (after)
Once we clean up the problem areas of these charts, we're presented with two completely different representations of the same exact data. However, this time, the information that is most important is what is conveyed to the audience. The title was changed to "Death Knights - D'Gentlemen," the data points were reordered and all of the bars, with the exception of "Death Knight," are the same color.
Pie Charts
Keynote Pie Chart (before)
Another popular chart type is the pie chart. One key thing to remember with these charts is the information conveyed is always the data point as a percentage of the whole. Even if the labels show raw numbers instead of percentages, the message that your audience receives is that of a percentage or fraction.
PowerPoint Pie Chart (before)
My two examples of the before versions of PowerPoint and Keynote slides are of the 3D variety. Though not the default, they are by far the most popular. These charts are intended to convey the population distribution among the different races in my World of Warcraft guild. Let's look at where these charts fail us:
- 3D It can't be said enough that 3D charts lie. In the Keynote example, the 10% slices look just a little bigger than they should, all because of the illusion of perspective. In the PowerPoint example, because the gray slice is just as tall as the green slice, the gray slice appears to be bigger. This is because with a 3D pie laid out as it is, our brain expects the gray slice to be shorter. The rules of perspective dictate that identical height objects at different distances appear to be different heights, with the one furthest away being the smaller. You also have the same problem you have with bar charts where smaller data points get extra surface area than they should get, proportionately.
Keynote Pie Chart (after)
- Texture and Colors The Keynote example is using its default fill texture. Marble doesn't add any value and instead distracts the eyes with a lot of visual noise. Many extraneous lines are added when only a few, those that separate the pie slices, are important. The PowerPoint slide uses colors that just don't contrast enough and lets slices "hide."
- Lack Of Values Leads To Guessing The lack of data values in the PowerPoint example leads to guessing about the relative sizes of the slices. The legends in both leave a lot to be desired, but Keynote can move that information to the slices without compromising too much (depending on the slice sizes). PowerPoint can move this information to the slices as well, but the size of the chart is sacrificed too much.
PowerPoint Pie Chart (after)
- Chart Junk The PowerPoint example contains the usual chart junk: chart borders and slice outlines.
I cleaned up the charts by flattening the charts, simplifying the colors & textures, using more dense and informational labels (where I could), and eliminating chart junk. The new slides should be more effective when presented to an audience.
