Using Microsoft Excel for Presentations Instead of PowerPoint

If you’re doing a presentation, you have to use PowerPoint or Keynote.

Or that, at any rate, seems to be the law in the corporate world. Still, have you ever given the matter more thought? If your presentations are going to consist almost entirely of tables, data and numbers, is there really any point in copying over all that data into a presentation?

Worse, adjusting the fonts, colors and schema to suit the presentation is just so many extra hours of work. The next time you have to make a presentation that has more data than you know what do with in MS-PPT, you might consider giving Excel a try.

Divide your analysis into different sheets

Excel can provide hyperlinks to different sheets. At the end of each stage of that complicated analysis that will win your company billions of dollars, just provide a quick hyperlink to the next sheet. This way, you can segment your story into different sections, and keep each stage relatively simple.

Charts and Smart Art Are Equally Easy in Excel

Who said you couldn’t rustle up an impressive story in MS Excel? Excel has almost all of the basic requirements you need to prepare an impressive presentation, including Smart Art. So just go ahead and give making basic lists and designs a go within Excel itself. After all, why get out of your comfort zone?

Excel is more flexible than PowerPoint

If you need to show the impact upon different variables due to a change in one parameter, Excel makes your life easy! Keep just one sheet in Excel, and have the scenarios you want to demonstrate dependent on your formulas. 

Remember, the whole point of a presentation is to tell a story – and nobody ever said that that story must be told in PowerPoint.