Maps as Icons

Quick wins for improving boring, black and white tables:

Transcript

[00:00:00] I wanna show you a really fun way to use maps.

And, as usual, you can do this inside everyday software like Excel and PowerPoint and Word.

So a few hours ago I was on a client call and I looked at their before version of a table and it looked like:

this.

It was just a black and white table, and they were like, “Ann, we wanna keep it as a table, but it can’t be so boring. We don’t want it to put people to sleep.”

Now these are obviously nobody’s real numbers. These are obviously nobody’s real hospital names, but the table did look like this with one column per location.

And the locations in real life were in different countries around the world.

So here is the idea that I shared with the client, and I wanna share with you too:

adding maps as icons above each column of the table.

In their real slide deck, and their real report, They had many, many tables like this, comparing the hospitals and showing all the data.

So you could [00:01:00] obviously repeat the little country icons, the little country silhouettes over and over and over throughout the slide deck and throughout the report for nice consistency.

Now you could use them in dark brand colors. This is Ann Emery’s brand purple that you probably recognize.

And try playing around with it. You know, adjust the colors ever so slightly. You can also try lighter versions of your brand colors and you can also try gray. Okay.

Now, this isn’t the only way to visualize this table, but it is the fastest.

This whole thing took me maybe 10 minutes max to make from start to finish.

I just made it in Excel and then I pasted it into PowerPoint.

As usual, If you have any how to questions, comment down below, and I will certainly point you in the right direction.