Tip of the week: Always try to develop a visualization of your data

There is rarely any point to showing raw or tabular data in a slide presentation.  It may make sense to the speaker, it may make sense in a journal article, but the audience in a slide presentation will be  unable to gain any significance from large groups of numbers.

The classic example of this is Anscombe's quartet, a tutorial on the subject developed by a statistician in 1973.  It is illustrated in the following two slides.  The first slide shows 4 distinct data sets, each  comprised of 11 data points.  As indicated, a wide variety of often used statistical parameters are identical for each of the four data sets. 

 However as shown in the following slide of graphs, each of the four data sets is telling a significantly different story.

A slide presentation is a visual experience.  If you have slides that are filled with numbers or your presentation is mostly text slides then you need to ask yourself whether a slide presentation is the right communication tool.  If you want to show lots of tables of numbers then you are probably better off using handouts and giving the audience time to digest the numbers.  Your job in a slide presentation is to help the audience understand by developing the most visually insightful displays.  The burden is on you, the speaker, to do this.