- In this video,
I'll be breaking down a real slide from PWC.
I'll show you what they did well,
what they could have done better
and how you can build your own high quality
consulting style slides, coming up.
(upbeat music)
Hey everyone, Paul here from the Analyst Academy
where we teach people PowerPoint and presentation
building skills, like what you might find
at a top tier consulting firm.
We've taught thousands of people
all over the world in professions,
ranging from consulting and finance
to nonprofits and education.
Plus, we provide trainings for teams of all sizes.
So, if you're interested
in full trainings for you or your company,
be sure to check us out at theanalystacademy.com.
Make sure you also stay connected
with us here on YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn
for more content, just like this.
And I'll make sure to include links
to everything in the description below.
The slide itself is actually pretty simple.
So here we have just a title
at the top and a single column chart.
The title says roughly half of employer health costs stem
from hospital inpatient
and outpatient services; the prescription drug share
is small but increasing.
Then the chart shows these different health costs
broken down by type,
physician costs, inpatient costs, et cetera.
Then it's further broken down
by what share each of these categories accounted
for in 2007 and then in 2017
with these red boxes showing the percentage change
between these two years.
What I like so far is the clarity
and descriptive detail in the title.
It tells you what they want you to know right upfront.
That way, when I look through the details of the chart,
I know what to be looking for.
The first part it says that inpatient
and outpatient services account
for about half of employer health costs
which I can see if I take a look
at each of those columns.
Inpatient accounts for 30%,
and outpatient for 19%,
for a total of 49%.
Now that's not something I would have noticed right away
or even at all, if they hadn't told me
in the title to look for it.
Then the second part of the title tells me
that prescription drug share is small but increasing
which you can see here in the category pharmacy.
It used to account for 14% back in 2007.
And by 2017, it accounted for 70%
which represents a 21% increase.
So exactly like it says small, but increasing.
So, the detail in the title is good
but now let's talk about how well it matches the chart.
The main message from the title seems to be
about those inpatient and outpatient costs
with the secondary message being
about the pharmacy category growth.
But if you look at the chart, the emphasis is reversed.
This is a clustered column chart
which puts different sub categories next to each other,
in this case, 2007 and 2017.
The effect this has is that
it emphasizes the differences between those years
and then those differences are highlighted even more
with these bright red colors
that show the percentage change.
Notice also how the columns are some sort of gray.
And the only part of the slide that is colorized
is this percentage change column.
So they've made it very obvious that the change from 2007
to 2017 is what they want you to notice,
which of course very much fits with the part of the title
that talks about the prescription drug share
and how it's small, but growing.
But then what about this other part of the title
that's supposed to be the main emphasis?
That's definitely not something they seem
to be emphasizing visually,
which means I have to go digging
for it just a little bit.
Now, it's not that it's hard to find,
but it does require me to locate the category names
on the bottom here,
then look at the percentages at the top of the columns
and add them together.
Of course, this process is not a big deal.
Most people will be able to make these connections
themselves in just a few seconds,
but when you're designing your slide,
your number one goal should be to make things
as easy as possible for your audience
because they're gonna be trying to process many things
at once while in most cases also trying to listen
to what you're saying.
So using visuals to help your audience
grasp your main message quickly is very key.
One way they could have made their point
a little more clear is by drawing attention
to these two categories a little bit more,
for example, they could have put a box over them
or added a call-out on the actual chart
or even both of those things.
But more fundamentally,
I think the problem is that,
this is the wrong chart type for the message.
It works great for the second part of the title
but it doesn't do a good job
of showing what portion two categories
make up of the whole.
Generally speaking, column and bar charts are best
for comparing two categories against each other.
In this case, that would mean either comparing
2007 with 2017,
which is what they've done or physician
with inpatient and outpatient and the other categories.
The reason why these charts are great for this,
is because you can easily compare the lengths
of the bars against each other.
But to show the portion
these two categories make up of the whole,
you're probably better off with a pie chart
and that's not something
you're gonna hear me say very often.
In general, pie charts are extremely overused
but in this case, it makes sense.
The reason why is because pie charts are good
for showing the portion of a total.
So in this case, you would put all the categories
from 2017 in a single pie chart
and use a different color to highlight the inpatient
and outpatient costs together.
This would show very clearly that they make up
about half of all employer health costs.
The audience hardly has to do any thinking here
to understand the message.
The obvious downside though,
is you can't really show changes very well
from 2007 to 2017, even with two pie charts side-by-side,
it's not gonna be nearly as clear
as it is with our clustered column chart.
So my recommendation
for this slide would actually be to have two charts,
the pie chart, and the clustered column chart,
each emphasizing a different message.
Rather than trying to squeeze two very different messages
into a single chart,
you can isolate each and make the visualizations very clear.
Another criticism I have with the chart
and with the slide more generally,
is the inconsistency of the words.
For example, in the title they say prescription drug
but the chart says pharmacy,
or how in the title,
they talk about employer health costs,
but in the chart it's framed
as employer health benefits.
I understand that these are referring to the same thing
but the lack of consistency adds a layer of confusion to me.
So despite how critical I've been overall,
I actually think it's a pretty decent slide.
The title is strong and the chart could be better
but it's still mostly clear.
The use of red is great and really helps highlight
the insights while still keeping the slide professional
but just adding a pie chart and adjusting
a few other small details,
the slide could really be a home run.
By the way, if you're interested
in doing the original presentation yourself,
PWC has made it publicly available for anyone
to download and we'll include a direct link
to the download page in the description below.
All right, that's going to do it for today's breakdown.
If you're interested in learning how to analyze slides
like this, or build your own consulting style slides
from scratch, make sure you check out
our full courses at theanalystacademy.com.
And again, make sure you stay connected
with us here on YouTube,
Instagram and LinkedIn for more content just like this.
Thanks for watching.
(upbeat music)