The best way to achieve effectiveness in business reporting is the direct approach. If you want to pass your points across to stakeholders and get them to listen, appreciate and enforce, you must be clear, simple and direct. When presenting a report, you must arrange it in a structured manner to deliver accurate information for faster decision making. Also, it must be captivating and interesting if you can help it because executives sometimes get bored with lengthy reports that will take time to decipher.
Therefore, to achieve the best results with your reporting any time or day, consider using PowerPoint. This tool will enable you to incorporate multimedia files into your report for a positive effect. You can use pictures, videos, animations, charts, and sound bites to make your presentation understandable and effective. Other options like Microsoft Word, Excel, Adobe InDesign are also good for reporting, but you can never achieve the same things with them as you would with PowerPoint.
Why Use PowerPoint
Apart from the obvious reason that this tool makes your reporting easy to build and update without stress, there are other benefits you need to know.
Visual Impact
You may not understand the effects of pictures, videos, charts, and animations until you use PowerPoint in your next report presentation. Any report presented with multimedia tools ensures that your audience will be focused and interested in what you are saying. Also, you as the presenter will be more interactive and impactful. When the people are seeing a clear pictorial representation of the points you are emphasizing, it helps them to understand and accept your evidence.
PowerPoint is Specifically for Reports
When you compare PowerPoint and Excel regarding report presentation, you will agree that while the latter is mainly for data collection and number manipulations, the former is made for presentations. Yes! Excel offers charts and graphs which you can use to organize your reports, but it can’t sort multiple charts usually present in a business report.
Meanwhile, PowerPoint offers all the editing tools that are necessary for presenting a comprehensive report.
PowerPoint is Easy to Navigate and Arrange Data
Take your mind back to some of the reports you have watched presented with PowerPoint; you will remember the ease at which the presenter navigates through the slides without difficulties. PowerPoint helps you to move easily between slides thereby enabling you to present relevant information faster and accurately.
Also, with the Slide Sorter View which PowerPoint offers, you can easily arrange your data as you wish.
It Encourages Team Collaboration
Another impressive benefit of using PowerPoint for reporting is that it facilitates collaboration amongst team members. When there is a team project, this reporting tool makes it easy to create an encompassing report which every member can access, contribute to and add comments.
Content Sharing
PowerPoint takes your report presentation to other levels by enabling you to share those reports globally. If you go online today, you can find many reports about many global concerns on platforms such as YouTube. Let’s also assume that some of the key people in your organization were not able to sit through your presentation; you can send the link on YouTube where they can watch it at their convenience. Apart from YouTube, you can also upload the PowerPoint report on other video sites and even update them whenever you have new information. All that is required is to log in to your YouTube account, click on “File”, and go down to “Save & Send” then “Create a Video”.
PowerPoint is Flexible
Another reason to use PowerPoint is that you can customize it to what your report requires. If it is necessary to use more texts in your report, it is easy to achieve. On the other hand, if your report demands more of images or a combination of texts and images, it is also customizable. The point is that however, your reports need to appear, PowerPoint is the right tool flexible enough to accommodate such demands.
It Can Be Linked To Data Sources
This is one of the top reasons for using PowerPoint in your report presentations. Instead of only presenting static information to the world or the stakeholders of your company, you can link your report to external sources on the internet that will keep updating your slides and enriching them with dynamic information. How do you achieve this? By using DataPoint to link your PowerPoint to Databases and Data Sources.
What is the DataPoint Software?
DataPoint is the next best thing that can upgrade your ordinary report to deliver real-time information for informed decision making. It allows you to create live reports, infographics, KPI Dashboards, Digital Signage, and Info Screens.
Uses of DataPoint
- DataPoint upgrades your presentation with new data and others who open it get new info
- It also allows others who can’t access your databases to see the snapshot presentation of your reports
- DataPoint offers a message board or real-time info when you run the slideshows on a dedicated monitor
- Also, DataPoint makes many integrations to Microsoft PowerPoint possible such as Access, SQL, SharePoint, IBM DB2, MySQL, Oracle, CSV files, Informix, Text Files, Facebook Likes, Exchange, Twitter, Yammer, Outlook, Excel, Yahoo Finance, RSS, Google Sheets, and Google Calendar, etc.
Conclusion
PowerPoint is by far the best tool you can use to make your report presentation a bomb! It helps you to capture the attention of your audience and makes your project effective. You can achieve all these when you use just the static info. Now think about the numerous benefits that await you when you create your presentation with dynamic information achievable by linking databases and internet sources using DataPoint. The things you stand to gain are numerous. Therefore, if you have been using Microsoft Excel, Word or Adobe InDesign all these whiles, it’s time to take your reports to the next level by using PowerPoint integrated with DataPoint. Give real-time information to the stakeholders and the world at large to enable them to make informed decisions.
Get your FREE DataPoint trial here.
