Presenting data from survey questionnaire

You conducted a survey, asked questions, did a poll, collected all these data and you are thinking to yourself, "Wow! It's a lot of data. How can I present them in a way that they will make sense to the target audience? Are there ways to show these data simply and clearly in a short presentation? Should I use a table, or a bar chart? How about listing each and every question asked?"

In this story, I am going to show you how to present survey data clearly in presentation slides. Before we decide how to present those data, we need to first decide what is important from the data that we collected. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to this first step. Analysing the data and pulling out what should be presented is a process that is needed to simplify the complexity of raw data, and turn it into information that is meaningful to the audience.

Once we have completed the first step, and are satisfied that the chosen information meets the objective, we can now decide on a display format to present the information visually.

Let's examine the visual in example 1 below. After analysing the raw data, 4 questions were chosen from the survey questionnaire for this presentation slide to illustrate why employees are not eating at the company's canteen. Each selected question was simplified into fewer words. Remember that this is for presentation slides and not for the printed report. Therefore, we need to ensure that information displayed is visible from where the audience is sitting. The bar chart format was chosen as it can clearly represent the data showing the differences in percentages.

Quite often we are tempted to include every question collected from the survey. But we need to keep our objective clear and only include content that meets the objective.

The visual in example 2 above uses a bar chart as a progress chart to illustrate status or progress of select activities. The description of each activity is displayed on top of each bar similar to the visual in example 1. Again, we want to ensure that we use only short text descriptions for the activity name.

These are just two examples. There are many other situations that you might be able to use a bar chart type to represent information (data) in the work that you do.

Give this a try in your next presentation and drop me an email about your experience.

Next: Stay tuned for my next story, where I will show how you can combine completion status data and schedule in the same visual, showing both sets of information clearly.