Last week, I was leading a post-conference workshop with CQI professionals in California. You can learn more about their annual conferences here.

An attendee asked about best practices for adding photographs to our PowerPoint presentations.

Before

Let’s pretend that you’re giving a presentation about young children and physical fitness.

Avoid Tiny, Grainy Photos

Here’s what I often see: small, low-resolution photos.

It gets The Big Red X.

I want your presentations to look professional, but this one’s giving outdated, unprofessional vibes.

Avoid Small, High-Resolution Photos

Nowadays, it’s easier than ever to find high-resolution photos.

I’ve tried dozens of photo sites, and my favorite is still Pexels.com.

All of their photos are free for both commercial and educational use.

You don’t need to create an account to download their photos (one less username and password to remember!).

You don’t need to add citations to your photos (so your slides stay uncluttered).

Over the past couple years, they’ve added more photos from international photographers, so you’ll see beautiful skin tones and hairstyles showcased among the models.

Here’s the next draft with a high-resolution photo:

Avoid Awkwardly-Enlarged Photos

We’ve solved the grainy issue.

Next, let’s solve the size issue.

I often see slides like this, where the photo is placed awkwardly on the slide.

We can’t keep those white slivers along the sides.

Avoid Stretched Photos

Please please please don’t stretch photos.

Yes, we want full-screen photos. But we must keep the aspect ratio (the proportions) intact.

Be careful if you’re manually dragging the sides, top, or bottom of the photo, as shown below.

The stretching is hardly recognizable on this particular photo, since it shows the backs of young children. But if you stretched a photo of someone’s face, it would be immediately noticeable (and it would look unprofessional).

Avoid Full-Screen Photos with Unreadable Text

As you’re enlarging photos to fill the entire screen—so the audience feels like watching the action from the 50-yard line, not the nosebleeds—make sure you grab the corner.

Grabbing the corner will ensure that photo doesn’t get stretched awkwardly (i.e., it maintains the aspect ratio).

Full-screen photos often fall off the edges of the slide, like this. That feels weird at first! Don’t worry; the audience will only see the completed version, with the beautiful full-screen photo. They won’t know that, behind the scenes, an inch of the photo is falling off the edge of the screen.

After

We’ve got a full-screen photo, woohoo!

Next, let’s make sure the words are readable (i.e., that we have enough contrast to meet official accessibility guidelines).

Full-Screen Photos with a White Overlay

To make sure the words are readable, try adding a white overlay.

Go to Insert –> Shape and draw a large rectangle over the entire slide. Then, adjust the transparency. This one has 15% transparency.

Your audience will easily read the large, 32-point font. And they’ll see the photo peeking out from behind, too.

In this example, the words are the star, and the photo is the sidekick.

Full-Screen Photos with a Colored Overlay

You can use brand-colored overlays, too.

The words are still the star, and the photo is still the sidekick.

Full-Screen Photos with White Text Boxes

In this example, I kept the photo’s original colors.

The text box is filled with white (with a 10% transparency so you can slightly see the photo peeking through the text).

The photo is the star now, and the words are the sidekick.

Full-Screen Photos with Colored Text Boxes

I think you get the idea by now.

You could also fill the text box with one of your brand colors, like this:

Phew! In these redesigned slides, our full-screen photos put the audience in the middle of the action, and the text is readable.

What If My Photo Isn’t Landscape?

We can’t always find landscape photos to fit our landscape slides.

Maybe the photo we want is square, circular, or portrait-oriented, like this one.

We can’t expand those pictures to fill the slide, or they might get too big.

Enlarge the Photo to Fit the Height (or Width) of the Slide

I often enlarge those photos to fill the height of my slide, even if they don’t fill the width of the slide, like this:

Experiment with Removing the Background

When I’m adding headshots to slides, sometimes I remove the background.

(This rarely works with non-headshot photos, like the photo of the children playing. Computers get confused, and they often mix up the background and foreground.)

PowerPoint does have a Remove Background button (!). To use it, click on the picture to activate it, then go to Picture Format –> Remove Background.

But PowerPoint’s Remove Background button is meh. It’s a newish feature and Microsoft still has some fine-tuning to work out.

Instead, I upload the photos to Canva, remove the background, download the edited version, and insert that into PowerPoint.

Canva gives me the correct results 90% of the time, whereas Microsoft gives me correct results 10% of the time.

Now, the photo and the words flow better, since they’re both against a white background.

Finally, you can try colored slide backgrounds, like this. You’d use your brand colors, not mine.

I think this final design might be my favorite of the batch.

All of these redesigns are better than the tiny, grainy original, don’t you agree?

Download My Slides

Want to explore these slides? Download them here.

I am in the process of completing the Great Graphs on-line course Ann offers.

It has been so valuable to my work. The course encompasses everything from working with data, to presenting the data in reports and making presentations.

Here are some of my favorite “aha” moments.

Change your Defaults to YOUR Formatting Favorites

Taking the time to set up themes, default colors, styles and customizing your default workbook can save you valuable time as you work.

I realized that every time I sat down to work on a project, I was making the same changes over and over.

From setting up our business color palette and fonts to adding the file name and page numbers as a footer, from setting landscape and no gridlines for printing to small margins, you can set all these up so that they are your default.

Now you’ll have more time to think about your data and how to visualize it!

This applies to Word as well. I set up a table template so that now, when I copy a table from Excel, all I need to do is click a button to change line thickness, font, alignment and cell margins.

It saves a ton of time and headache!

ExcelJet is a website that I’ve found to be a great source for this type of information.

Photographs are Powerful and Versatile

I used to take a photo I thought related to my point and plop it into the middle of a slide and feel proud of adding visual interest.

It was a good start from a slide of words and tables, but there are so many more possibilities! Some very simple tips, like changing the colors to black and white and adding a transparent colored block over it have created a new world of possibilities for my work.

My very favorite new trick relates to “stretching” a photograph, by copying it and cropping it down to a strip that can be stretched to provide coverage of the slide in the same color palette of the photo.

I started with the photo on the left. I liked the movement implied, but wanted the child to be to the left instead of the right.

If you look closely at the image below, there is a seam visible, and the grass across the bottom is clearly stretched. In a presentation, people are not likely to notice.

Studying Design Increases Confidence and Reduces Stress

After taking this course, I have much more confidence in making decisions about design elements in my work.

Like many of you, I was trained in data analysis, not presentation.

I have so many more tools to choose from for working in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint to ensure I get my point across to my audience.

This has reduced my stress levels, increased my confidence, and freed up my mental energy to focus on the meaning of the data.

Ensure Your Data Has the Impact it Should

These are just a few of the tricks I have learned over the past year.

I am looking forward to continuing to learn and apply these skills to ensure our data has the impact it should!

Nikole Lobb Dougherty, Associate Director of the Brown School Evaluation Center, currently serves as the vice president of the Evaluation Association of St. Louis (EASL).   

Since EASL is a volunteer organization, board members felt it was beneficial to develop a style guide for the organization to ensure future volunteers had guidelines when developing EASL related promotional materials and/or reports to ensure a consistent look and feel to these products.  

This post is about the process used to develop EASL’s style guide, putting many of Ann’s tips and trick into action. 

Here’s a common problem we hear from many of the non-profit, social service, philanthropic and other organizations we work with: “We don’t have the resources to hire a design professional to help us with our branding and help design all of our reports or products.” 

Making reports, presentations, and other communications have a consistent and polished look and feel may be a lot easier than you think. We have found that a great starting point is a do-it-yourself visual style guide – which can be developed with very few resources. 

What is a Style Guide?

A “style guide” defines the visual and editorial standards that will used by your organization or team to create consistently designed communications such as annual/quarterly reports, newsletters, websites, posters, flyers and so on. 

 We have found that developing a style guide for different projects or organizations we work with has been a handy reference tool to help maintain this consistency and a polished look and feel.  

A style guide not only provides guidelines for dissemination and communication materials, but it can also be a tool to increase design capacity within your organization or team.  

Here at the Brown School Evaluation Center at Washington University in St. Louis, we develop a style guide for each partner we work with. We have helped partners develop simple style guides based on their available resources (e.g., Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint) to design a conference poster or an evaluation report.  

We often start with an existing logo or website (most organizations have a budget or resources for ‘bigger’ design stuff like this) for inspiration for the style guide.  

Below are five key steps along with some cool resources we have found helpful in setting up a style guide.  

Getting Started with Style Guides 

We most often document our style guides in Microsoft Word or PowerPoint. This document outlines the basic design guidelines for an organization, team, or project.  

We include at least five components in each of our style guides: logo, color, fonts, charts, and images.  

Below are key steps to identifying each of these components for a style guide for the Evaluation Association of St. Louis (EASL). 

Step 1: Locate High-Quality Logos

Most of the organizations or partners we work with have existing logos or websites.  

The more common challenge is that staff don’t know how to access high-quality versions of their logo.  

Many individuals end up going to the website, right clicking on the logo, then saving the image.  

The result? A low-quality version of the logo that looks fuzzy when you insert it into a document.  

A high-quality logo file is key.  

Often this is a PNG or JPEG file and most designers who develop logos can export the logo in this format.  

For printing purposes, it is suggested the logo size should be 500px for small prints and 1024px for larger prints. 

How to Find the Resolution and Size of Your Logo 

To see the resolution and size of the logo you are working with: 

1. Right-click on your logo file. 
2. Select “Property.”
3. Under the “Details” tab, you will find the information for image size.  

The EASL logo size is 2199px by 852px. 

Save High-Quality Logos for Everyone in One Folder 

We find it helpful to save all the high-quality logos in a designated spot and provide the location (e.g., file pathway) in the style guide.  

If the organization has logos of different orientations, then we include each variation in the style guide.  

If a logo does not exist but a website does, you can use the existing website to help you choose a color palette instead. 

Here’s how we describe the variation of the logo and provide the logo file pathway in the style guide: 

Step 2: Choose a Color Palette 

Next, we figure out what colors are used in the logo or website.  

Ask Communications Staff for the Existing Style Guide 

If we have access to our partner’s communications staff or the logo designers, we ask for the colors used.  

When we don’t have access to these individuals, we use some helpful tools to get this information.  

Use an Eyedropper Tool to Detect Color Codes 

There are several color picker tools available online for free. The Instant Eyedropper is highly recommended by Ann K. Emery – and we love it too! Check out this tutorial of how to use it.   

The Instant Eyedropper decodes the color in the logo: 

Have a One-Color or Two-Color Logo? Generate a Color Palette Based Off the Logo’s Primary Colors 

Using the eyedropper tool, we detected the primary colors that are part of the organization’s logo.  

Next, we moved to creating color palette using the primary colors detected.  

COOLORS is a great free online tool to help you generate a good-looking color palette. This tool also allows you to test for color blindness test to ensure accessibility of selected colors. 

Lock the primary colors in the panel and the tool generates the color schemes for you! 

Document the Color Codes in Your Style Guide 

Document the CMKY and RGB codes for each color in your style guide.  

If your organization typically only uses Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, then you will need those RGB codes.  

CMYK codes are used in Adobe Creative Cloud and other platforms. 

Here’s the color palette for EASL in the style guide: 

Step 3: Choose Fonts 

Typography is very serious in the design world but the primary thing you need to know is there are two major font styles: Sans Serif and Serif.   

Serif fonts usually have a more book-style, old-fashioned, and traditional look. These fonts have little decorative stroke, or “little feet,” that extends from letters. Serifs are generally easier to read in lengthy or smaller print.  Think about using serif fonts for your narrative or body text.  

Sans Serif fonts tend to look a bit more modern, crisp and clean. It also lets people know that you’re more “approachable.” These fonts work well for headings, graphics/charts, and titles. 

Here’s an example of serif vs. sans serif: 

How Many Typefaces Do You Need? 

We generally try to choose no more than two to three typefaces for each style guide.  

We choose fonts that have the right amount of contrast—including at least one serif and one sans serif font.

The Fonts We Chose for EASL 

By eyeballing the EASL logo, we saw that the EASL logo used fonts from the Sans Serif font family.  

We chose Source Sans Pro as the primary font and Rockwell (from Serif font family) as secondary font to provide variety for design use. 

Source Sans Pro is our favorite – looks modern and clean, and has a great variety of options within its font family. It’s also a free and open-source font! 

Fed up with the default fonts in Word and PowerPoint (e.g., Calibri, Arial, Times New Roman)?  

Need Font Inspiration? 

There are other options for you!  

Google Fonts provides a good variety of typefaces and it’s FREE to download.  

Google Fonts is one of our favorite source for free fonts. 

Not Sure What Your Existing Font is Called? 

There are some online tools to help identify what the font is in your logo or any images (The Font Squirrel Matcherator, WhatTheFont!).  

If it is not a standard font available in the platforms you are using (e.g., Word, PowerPoint) it may be best to find a font of similar style to ensure others outside your organization have access to the fonts included in the style guide. 

Step 4: Provide Image and Charts Guidelines or Examples

Photos are a powerful and compelling visual tool. Even though we may not have all the professional knowledge about photography, we do tend to have a natural instinct for what images represent our organizations, teams, or projects.

What to Consider When Choosing Photographs 

In the style guide, we find it helpful to show examples of images that represent the organization, team or project well.  

When selecting photos, we gravitate towards photos that are human-focused and personal, and try to keep in mind representing diverse groups or experiences.  

We have found it helpful to either select some images to include in the style guide that can be used by team members or minimally link to a collection of potential photos that have been curated by whomever is developing the style guide.  

Where to Find Photographs 

We often use Unsplash and Pexels to curate collections of photos/images – since they have many high quality images and photos for free (for both commercial and noncommercial purposes).  

In curating a small collection of images, we identify key words/concepts related to the organization, team, or project.  

In developing the EASL style guide we identified a few concepts and then organized these images by these key words using Unsplash. 

Here’s our team member curated collection of images using key words search/concepts associated with EASL (from Unsplash): 

Including Sample Graphs in Your Style Guide 

Beyond photos we want our graphics, charts, and data visualization to maintain a consistent look and feel as well (check out Ann’s blog about intentional color schemes).  

In the style guide, we find it helpful to provide some examples demonstrating how to apply the color palette in the bar charts and pie charts, and which colors should be used for comparison data. 

Here’s how we provide color palette options for charts: 

Step 5: Share, Share, Share 

The creation of the style guide can be a shared responsibility or done by just one creative team member.  

Once the style guide is created you must make your team or organization aware it exists! 

How to Share Your Style Guide 

Share the style guide(s) at staff meetings and send an email announcement.  

Make the location of the style guide and related resources (e.g., logos, stock images) accessible to all team members. 

The EASL Style Guide 

Below is a snapshot of the EASL style guide.  

This guide is shared with current and future team members to increase the likelihood that there is consistent branding and look and feel for all EASL products.

How We Used Our Style Guide 

Here’s an EASL flyer we created by following the design elements in the style guide: 

Additional Resources for Style Guides 

Are you ready to develop a style guide? 

Check out some additional related resources. Enjoy! 

• How to Enter Your Custom Color Codes in Microsoft Excel 
• Work Smarter, Not Harder, When Visualizing Data  

You know the document. It’s the one your agency references over and over again, but nobody has the time to redo or update such a long reference guide. This year, I had a 120-page HIV testing program protocol from 2009 that desperately needed a content and formatting overhaul. So I tried Ann’s tips on redesigning reports, and here is what I learned.  

This project took several months because I was working on it alongside other projects. I completed this whole update in Microsoft Word. There were two phases of this project, content editing and redesigning the layout of the report.  

[I use the term “protocol” in this blogpost to refer to document containing a set of requirements that need to be met for a funded agency to run a specific program or project.] 

Redesign Tricks that Work

Here are four strategies for redesigning your report: 1) add color, 2) add more visuals, 3) add checklists and summary lists, and 4) create a 20-minute cover.

1. Add Color 

I added color to each section of the protocol so the viewer can quickly tell which part of the guide they are reading.  

Bold color helps break up the long document and makes it more engaging. I also included an overview at the beginning of each section, so the audience knew what information they would find in each part of the protocol. 

When selecting colors from your agency’s brand colors, try to choose colors that have high contrast against a white background. The American Disabilities Act includes a section on 508 compliance, which means that all content on a website must be accessible to people with disabilities. This definitely applies to text. I use this color contrast tool to determine if my colors meet the federal recommendation of WCAG 2.0 level AA standards. Your colors should at minimum be AA compliant if you are adding color to your text.  

Tips for Adding Colored Blocks Behind Text

Here is a trick to create more accessible documents and save you time when you are adding color to your headers and sub headers: 

1. Format your heading exactly as you want, including font, font size, and color. 
2.  Highlight the text you want to be the heading and right click on Heading 1 at the top of your page (see picture below). 
3. Select “Update Heading 1 to Match Selection.”  
4. Now anytime you want to format your text as Heading 1, just highlight the text you want to format and click Heading 1 at the top of the page. Boom. Done.  

This shortcut works for multiple headings and sub headings and is a major time savor when reformatting documents. This strategy also helps make your document more accessible under 508 compliance guidelines because it helps software for people with disabilities better navigate your content. 

2. Add More Visuals

To make our agency’s document more reader friendly, I wanted to add as many visuals as possible. I looked for places where a visual might help the audience better remember the content. This could be icons, photos, diagrams, timelines, etc. All of these help break up the text for a reader. 

3. Add Checklists and Summary Lists to Long Documents 

This is a lengthy document, so to make it easier for our partners to use, I added check lists and summary boxes with color for quick, easy reference. 

These check boxes can be found under the bullet lists in Word.

I broke down the longer lists into more digestible groups that could be taken out of the protocol and used independently.  

4. Create the 20-Minute Cover 

This cover really did take just twenty minutes to design.

I chose a compass for the background because these program guidelines provide guidance and direction for our grantee agencies who conduct HIV testing around the state. 

I also used a photo of a compass as the background for each of my section headers to build continuity throughout the whole document.  

Report Cover Tips

Try these additional tips when creating your cover:

• Consider the main points of your report or protocol when searching for photos. Use your main ideas to guide your photo searches. Think of what your protocol or report symbolizes and start by typing those words into the photo searches.  
• Avoid images and clip art you see regularly. For example, try to stay away from pictures of puzzle pieces, big question marks, and light bulbs. A good rule of thumb is if you have seen it a lot then it might be overused.  
• If you are going to use a picture of people in the background of your cover, consider what color you put over your photo. Some colors like green or red may unintentionally make the people in your image look sick, or it could just be unflattering.  
• Another option is to use a large icon or vector image to fill the background of your cover. Choose an icon that fills your whole page. Check out these other two reports where I used an icon instead of a photo: 

Result 

To redesign this protocol, I added color to my section breaks and headers, included more diagrams and visuals, created easy to use checklists to make this long document more user friendly, and inserted a 20-minute cover. Ann’s blog post helped launch this redesign, and then I was able to build on her recommendations. I was surprised that her cover strategy works and really only took 20 minutes to find a photo and design the cover. Using a different photo with each report makes each cover unique and saves me from having to come up with a new cover design for each publication.  

Deciding on colors and fonts upfront also saved me lots of time during the redesign phase. It minimized the number of decisions I had to make while reformatting the document. I have received positive feedback from our partners that this version of the protocol is more user friendly and accessible. It is easier to find and retain the key information they need to know about their program.  

Going through this redesign process helps legitimize our department and show that our content and program requirements are up to date with the latest national guidelines. This helps build rapport with our grantee agencies and minimizes the number of repeat questions that are now readily answered in this easy to use protocol. 

Check out the full protocol.  

A Data Visualization Style Guide 

Redesigning this protocol inspired me to create a data visualization style guide for my department, similar to a communications style guide. A data visualization style guide establishes color, font, line, and size guidelines for charts and maps, so anyone can make charts or reports in our department, and they will all look cohesive and align with our brand. 

Here are some examples of data visualization style guides. 

Branding continuity builds trust with your key stakeholders and makes you and your work look more professional. 

Learn More from Sara DeLong 

Subscribe to my blog, so you will be the first to know when I post about creating this data visualization style guide!

Except… Mine were way worse! I loved to write 100 pages of 11-point font and bullet points instead of these four summarized pages.

If you’re a full-time graphic designer, then you have 40 hours a week to get fancy with covers and other visuals.

But if you’re a full-time researcher, evaluator, scientist, or university faculty member (like this report’s author), your time to mess around with reports is limited.

I’m going to walk you through five easy steps that you can tackle in just two hours:

1. Add a 20-Minute Cover
2. Add a Text Hierarchy
3. Color-Code by Section
4. Add Intentional Page Breaks
5. Add More Visuals

Step 1: Add a 20-Minute Cover

Covers for short reports are optional, but they sure add a lot of visual interest to a text-heavy report.

I experimented with two 20-Minute Covers. The first cover is a full-bleed photograph. The second cover is a word cloud made from the report’s key words.

Here’s how I added the 20-Minute Cover with the full-bleed photo:

I added a new, blank page to the beginning of the document. I typed The ABC Library and 2017-18 Annual Report in large font.

You’ll use your institution’s fonts, not mine.

I went to www.Pexels.com and searched for library. I like Pexels because it has enough options without having too many options. You’ve got better things to do than spend your entire afternoon searching for stock photography. Plus, the photos on Pexels are free for both educational and commercial use.

If your organization already has its own repository of stock images—great! Use those.

I downloaded this photograph of a bookshelf.

I inserted the image file into my Word document.

I moved the image behind the text. To do this, I clicked on the image, went to Picture Tools: Format, and selected Wrap Text: Behind Text.

Tiny photos are so 1995. Nowdays, the bigger, the better. I wanted a full-bleed photograph; in other words, a photograph that filled the entire page with no margins whatsoever.

I enlarged the image until it filled the page (11 inches tall).

The photograph and the words were competing for attention, so I changed the font from black to white.

It was still too hard to read the text. I covered the image in a semi-transparent purple rectangle. You’ll use your institution’s color palette, not mine.

You’ll need to experiment with different transparencies (e.g., 10%, 20%, 30%, or higher).

Here’s how I added the 20-Minute Cover with the word cloud:

I added a new, blank page to the beginning of the document. I typed The ABC Library and 2017-18 Annual Report in large font.

I highlighted the entire report’s contents with a CTRL + A keyboard shortcut.

I went to www.wordle.net to make a word cloud. This site works best with Internet Explorer.

I spent 19 of my 20 minutes updating Java and giving permissions for the site to run on my computer.

I pasted the report’s contents into Wordle.

I adjusted the word cloud’s settings. I used horizontal text (I didn’t want distracting vertical text on my cover). I selected a Sans Serif font. I chose a grayscale color scheme.

I downloaded the word cloud.

I inserted the image file into my Word document.

I enlarged the image until it filled the page (11 inches tall and a million inches wide).

I moved the image behind the text. To do this, I clicked on the image, went to Picture Tools: Format, and selected Wrap Text: Behind Text.

The word cloud and the words were competing for attention, so I changed the words from black to white and covered the word cloud in a semi-transparent purple rectangle.

Which 20-Minute Cover is your favorite?

I liked the photograph better than the word cloud.

Step 2: Add a Text Hierarchy

When you zoom out and glance at the report, nothing stands out. It’s just a sea of text because everything is size 11.

I enlarged the Heading 1s from size 11 to size 38 bold. I often use even larger font for my headings (40s, 50s, or even 60s). But, some of the headings were long, and I didn’t want them to spill onto a third line. I kept all the headings to just one or two lines of text.

I also enlarged the Heading 2s from size 11 to size 13 bold.

Finally, I changed the black text into colored text to further differentiate the Heading 1s and Heading 2s from the regular ol’ body font.

Now, you can spot the sections of the report at a glance.

Step 3: Color-Code by Section

It’s a short report but it still feels dense. We need to break it up even more. Readers love skimming.

I color-coded the headings by section:

Step 4: Add Intentional Page Breaks

Make sure every section begins on a new page.

I use CTRL + Enter to add page breaks (rather than pressing the Enter key a dozen times).

Intentional page breaks are the easiest edit, yet researchers, evaluators, and scientists shy away from page breaks.

Why are we so afraid of white space? It’s not going to bite us.

Why are we so afraid of adding another page or two to our already-way-too-long reports? A well-designed report beats a non-designed report every time, regardless of the length.

Step 5: Add More Photos

The zoomed-out, at-a-glance view was really coming together! Our readers can see that the report has a few different sections because each section begins on a new page, with large font, and in a new color.

I still needed to add visuals. I suggest aiming for one visual per page—a graph, photograph, table, diagram, logo, etc. It would be great to comb through the entire report and find ways to incorporate graphs, tables, or diagrams. But this report was largely a list of bullet points, and I didn’t have the time or the background knowledge to completely overhaul its contents. I wanted to focus on the low-hanging-fruit edits.

When you’re pressed for time, or if you’re new to data visualization, you can add icons and/or photographs.

The default Microsoft book icons looked cheesy when placed next to the nice stock photograph. Mixing icons and photos just didn’t look right.

I decided to repeat the cover photo behind each of the Heading 1s.

I inserted the photograph, placed it behind the text, expanded it to fit the full width of the page, cropped it to be just a few inches tall, and overlaid colorful semi-transparent rectangles.

These small edits can transform a text-heavy report into a visual-lite report.

This transformation took me an hour. The vast majority of that time was spent banging my head against the wall thanks to the Wordle/Internet Explorer/Java trifecta of insanity. I’m calling it a Two-Hour Turnaround because everything takes longer when you’re doing it for the first time.

Don’t lose sleep over report formatting. You’ve got better things to do. Instead, just follow my easy steps and make drastic improvements to your document’s appearance within an hour or two.

There are so many options when it comes to reporting software, but one familiar face I often find myself turning to is Microsoft PowerPoint. You might not immediately think of PowerPoint when it comes to creating formal reports, but I love using it in lieu of more common applications like Word. Positioning new images and text boxes into a document is just easier in PowerPoint. You don’t need to worry about anchoring items or how inserting new text might change the position of items you’ve already included on a page. It’s a blank canvas without many limitations.

Here are some screenshots from a report that I wrote in PowerPoint. These pages come from our Lorikeet Adventure: Guest Experience Research Brief.

Here are a few tips I keep in mind when using PowerPoint to design my evaluation reports. Note: I’m working in MS Office 2016.

1. Changing slide orientation: I like a traditional page layout for a report I know my readers will likely print, not the default slide size (16:9 aspect ratio). To change it, I go to the Design pane and create a custom slide size, change the settings to 8.5” by 11”, and select a Portrait orientation.
2. Making use of the page ruler, gridlines, and guides: In the View pane I always select Ruler and Guides (and sometime Gridlines) so I can make sure key text and objects are in the same position on each page. I also know my readers will likely print and use a staple in the upper left corner so I make sure to keep one guide line at a half inch from the left. This lets me position headers and text where I know a staple won’t get in the way.
3. Using built in arrangement options for multiple text boxes or images: Don’t spend too much time clicking that left arrow or right arrow to “nudge” objects into just the right place on a page. Select all the objects you wish to align, go to the Home pane, select Arrange, and then select Align. There are built in arrangement options there which perfectly align or evenly distribute everything at once. This is one feature that consistently saves me time and makes everything look better.
4. Inserting shapes and lines as design elements: I love using basic shapes and lines in different variations on a page to give the design of a report a sleek and professional feel. I avoid predefined slide design templates at all costs, they don’t often follow the principles of good design.
5. Using fill color and transparency: I’m not always confident in knowing which colors compliment each other so to avoid having to pick different colors, but still give some visual variation, I increase the degree of fill color transparency on key shapes or objects. I also like doing this on cover pages when most often the entire slide background is a photograph. Inserting overlapping shapes with 50% transparency creates a sophisticated visual effect and also adds some darker space on the page perfect for a title or text header to stand out.
6. Copying page design for the whole report: Most of the time I like my background design and title text to be consistent on each page. Once I’ve created a page layout I like I simply copy and paste that slide for the remainder of the report pages. This is a quick solution to having to re-create the most common design elements in your report over and over again. I’ve used a more elegant solution lately by editing the slide master in the View pane and editing the default fonts and colors in the Design pane.
7. Editing dataviz directly in PowerPoint: I used to spend a lot of time editing charts directly in Excel, then copy/pasting them into PowerPoint. This would sometimes cause size and formatting issues so I’d have to do a few edits there too. PowerPoint has the same chart editing and layout features as Excel does so now I create a basic default chart in Excel using my data, copy/paste that right away into PowerPoint, and do all of my editing there.
8. Letting your copy editor do their thing: I always need a copy editor when I finish a report. PowerPoint provides similar review and comment features as Word does. It’s not quite as extensive but it does the trick. Under the Review pane you can select text, add comments, and select “start inking” to highlight areas is the report that need further attention.
9. Saving your report: Save your report as a PDF or XPS document when you’re ready to send to your readers. They’ll be dazzled by the beauty of your work and be none the wiser that you used trusty ole PowerPoint to design it.

Here’s another report that I designed within PowerPoint. These pages come from our Zoo Lights: Guest Experience Survey Report.

Have you tried writing your reports in PowerPoint instead of in Word? If so, please share your tips in the comments section below.