slidedocs

In my workshops, we often discuss the challenge that arises when the communication you're creating is meant to be both 1) projected or handed out in a live presentation, as well as 2) sent as a follow up for those who attended to refer back to, or to fill in those who weren't able to attend the presentation. In an ideal world, these would be two separate work products. In reality, however, this often gives rise to what Nancy Duarte calls the slideument, a single document that is meant to address both needs.

The problem, of course, is that by trying to meet too many needs at once, the slideument doesn't address any of them perfectly. If you're interested in my further pontification on the topic and some thoughts on how to address the challenges that arise with the slideument, you check out this blog post.

My interest was piqued when I saw that Nancy Duarte recently introduced a new concept for using slides, which she has termed Slidedocs. The description on her site describes slidedocs as "a visual document, developed in presentation software, that is intended to be read and referenced instead of projected." The FastCo Design article written about Duarte's slidedocs is titled "Book Written Entirely in Power Point Aims to Reinvent How Businesses Communicate" (article).

With my busy schedule this week, I haven't had a chance to give the 150 page doc more than a cursory review. But rather than wait until I have more time to consume and reflect before sharing, I figured I'd post this now and gather your inputs. What do you think? Will this revolutionize the way we communicate? Leave a comment with your thoughts. I'll add mine once I have a chance to look more closely at the detail.

slopegraph template

I've found myself increasingly using slopegraphs as of late. They can be useful when you have two time periods of data and want to quickly see increases/decreases between the two periods (example below; see second half of this post for more discussion and another example).

From a formatting standpoint, however, they are annoying. They take a lot of time to set up because basically everything is different from graphing application defaults. I realized as I was making a recent one that I make the exact same changes every single time and may actually leverage a template for this (I say "may actually" because I thought that would be the case once before, but it didn't happen, though I've heard from others that they do use it).

In case you find yourself wanting to use a slopegraph (or quickly see whether one will work given the specifics of your data), you can download the Excel template I created here (screenshot below).