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Guerilla reporting tactics I

Today’s marketing needs to be even fresher, funnier and more shocking than that from yesterday – just to grab the audience’s attention. Why not try the same strategy on your management? After all, managers are just as overwhelmed with masses of reports (and PowerPoint slides) as consumers are with wads of advertising.

Be forgetful One idea is to leave things lying around – say, a draft design for the latest sales report – where others can “accidentally” find them. There is a good chance that the next person who sits down at your seat at the conference table will be glad to have it. Maybe he is bored and happy that he has something to read instead of just doodling.

Find new perspectives Sometimes all you need to do is look at things from a different angle. For example, change the columns to bars in a waterfall chart. Bella can explain how.

Outsmart the projector The resolution of PowerPoint slides is too poor for presenting dense information. A better alternative is to put your ideas on paper. Niels Olson also gave us the tip that his medical professor uses Quicktime VR to integrate high-resolution images into PowerPoint. This report extract illustrates how:

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This next example shows how you can project 7,800 data values into a single ledger-sized (A3) sheet of paper (2.8 MB). Both examples require the Quicktime plug-in. To zoom in or out of the navigation, click on +/- at the bottom-left side of the screen.

If you add a paper handout as well, you even kill two birds with one stone. You demonstrate the limitations of PowerPoint in a joking manner and the readers witness the information density of paper handouts with their own eyes.