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Find examples of creative PowerPoint Charts that show performance compared to a target range. Make your charts insightful and your message memorable.
Performance compared to a target range:
Let’s say you want to show sales performance of a product over 12 months. Your preferred performance range is between 26 and 35. The usual mistake presenters make is to show the information as a data table, and leave the audience to figure out the months that performed within the preferred range:
Naturally audience chooses to switch off rather than to process the data mentally.
A slightly better alternative is to point out the months that performed well as follows:
This demands a lot of effort from the presenter and is error prone. The information shown is still not visual.
So, what is the way out?
In this article, we will explore some useful graphical ways to showcase performance compared to a target range.
Note: All the data driven PowerPoint Chart examples you see in this article are part of our ‘Visual PowerPoint Graphs Pack’.
The pack has more than 320 business relevant graph templates that are super easy to use. You just need to replace sample data with your own data.You can find more about the pack at the end of this article.
Charts with preferred target range
Here is a visual representation of the information we discussed above. We combine a line chart with stacked column chart to present the details:
Source: Performance Compared to Range from Visual Graphs Pack
Audience can easily see the months that are not within the preferred target range.
The advantage of this visualization technique is – you can define multiple parameters to give context to your performance. For example, the following chart template shows performance against qualitative parameters like Poor, Good and Excellent.
The actual performance values are shown as data labels. Here is a variation of the chart with four performance bands:
Related: Best Practices for Creating Performance Reports
With a bit of imagination it is possible to accommodate multiple performance points compared against multiple parametric ranges, without the chart looking messy. Here is an example:
Source: Performance Compared to Range from Visual Graphs Pack
Applying Conditional formatting:
You can take your chart to the next level by applying conditional formatting to the columns.We share some PowerPoint Chart examples with such formatting below.
For example, in the following chart ‘Ideal’, ‘Under performance’ and ‘Over delivery’ are indicated by different colors. The preferred range is shown as a grey band in the chart example below.
It is possible to vary the target range each month. For example, in the following chart we combined column chart with stacked area chart to indicate if the production has ‘Met’ ‘Exceeded’ or ‘Fallen short’ of the forecast range given for each month.
You can even add a condition to show ‘Minimum’ and ‘Maximum’ values automatically in the chart as follows:
As you saw with these PowerPoint Chart examples, you can make your data slides truly remarkable and your message memorable.
Related: More Creative Target Vs Performance Charts
Smarter Chart Option for Busy Presenters:
A common excuse given by business presenters for not using such insightful charts Is – paucity of time. That is why we came up with our ‘Visual PowerPoint Graphs Pack’.
With our preformatted chart templates, the time to create a meaningful chart is the same as the time it takes to create a boring data table. To edit the chart you right click on the chart, go to ‘Edit data’. A worksheet opens up. You update the numbers in the yellow cells.
You don’t even have to type in the numbers. You can copy data from your excel sheet to this sheet. It doesn’t get any easier than that.
The pack has over 320 chart templates to cover every chart type imaginable. The slides are stunningly designed. So, why waste time constructing your charts from the scratch, when you have such high quality solution available off the shelf?
If you liked this article, please do leave a comment below. You can find more articles about data visualization in this section.