The Microsoft MVP Award Program Blog

PowerPoint 2013: Visualizations Part 3: Creating Infographics with SmartArt and Apps for Office

MVP Award Program — Mon, 20 May 2013 22:02:00 GMT

Editor’s Note:The following post was written by PowerPoint MVP Glenna Shaw.

PowerPoint 2013: Visualizations

Part 3: Creating Infographics with SmartArt and Apps for Office

In the previous two parts of this series, we discussed creating infographics specifically from data. But infographics is not only about numerical data. By definition, infographics is the graphical representation of information. Information can include words, sentences, images, etc. as well as numbers. SmartArt is specifically designed to create infographics by changing text into pictorial representations of concepts. In this part of the series we’ll discuss elevating standard SmartArt to create unique and effective infographics. We’ll also discuss some of the new apps that are available for Office 2013 and how you can take advantage of them to create some great infographics. This article assumes you already know how to create and modify SmartArt. It also assumes you’ve read all previous parts of this series.

Shady Sam has decided he’s going to offer some great financing options for hybrid cars. These are the loan options depending on the buyer’s qualifications:

5 Year	4 Year	3 Year
• 3%	• 2%	• 0%
• 4%	• 3%	• 1%

In a typical presentation, you might see a SmartArt hierarchy list used to display this information. This is leaps and bounds better than a bulleted list but once again, we find a graphic with incomplete context. There is no ready indicator that these financing options are for hybrid cars only. It doesn’t make the jump from information to knowledge. We can easily improve on this SmartArt by simply changing it to a radial list and, staying consistent, use the leaf car as the fill for the main image. As you can see, it’s a good start, but it still needs some work.

To complete this SmartArt transformation, take the following steps:

Click on the largest shape and change it to a rectangle shape.
Rotate the picture by flipping it horizontally.
Change the color to green.

We now have a complete infographic for the sales team meeting presentation. However, this is also knowledge we want to share with prospective buyers. And for that purpose we want an even more polished look to our infographic. Perform these steps to improve the infographic even more:

Change the leaf car fill to the same image you used for your hybrid car on the Air Quality – Hybrid Car Sales chart.
Adjust the fill offsets and the size of your SmartArt rectangle until the aspect ratio is correct and the size is proportional with the rest of the graphic.
Decrease the size of the percentage text to be slightly smaller than the loan text.

We now have effective infographics for both the sales team meeting and for marketing to customers.

SmartArt is one of the best tools for creating infographics but, new in Office 2013, we have some exciting offerings in Apps for Office in the Microsoft Office Store. To see what Apps are available:

In PowerPoint 2013, click Insert.
Click Apps for Office in the Apps group.
Click See All.
Click Featured Apps in the Apps for Office dialog window.

The featured apps that work with PowerPoint are listed. Enter Pro Word Cloud (free app) in the search box and then install the app in PowerPoint 2013. Learn more about Managing Apps for Office here. To create a Word Cloud graphic:

Enter a lot of relevant words.
Select the words (don’t skip this step).
Click Insert, Apps for Office, Pro Word Cloud.
Choose your Word Cloud options in the Pro Word Cloud pane.
Click Create Word Cloud.
Right click and Copy/Paste the Word Cloud onto your slide or save the Word Cloud as an image and insert it.
Use PowerPoint 2013’s picture tools to edit the image as desired.

We now have a fun Word Cloud infographic. We can also use some of the visualization apps for Excel even though they’re not available for PowerPoint. Just select the visualization created in Excel and copy/paste as an image into PowerPoint 2013. I’ve shown the Gauge App and the Geographic Heat Map in my example above.

This completes part 3 of the series on Visualizations: Creating Infographics with SmartArt and Apps for Office. In part 4 we’ll be adding motion to infographics.

Friday Five - May 17, 2013

MVP Award Program — Thu, 16 May 2013 19:33:00 GMT

1. Using Bit Fields in C#

By Visual C# MVP Filip Ekberg - @fekberg

2. Top 5 Tips & Tricks for Surviving TechEd 2013

By Silverlight MVP Michael Crump - @mbcrump

3. Comments and Descriptions in DAX

By SQL Server MVP Chris Webb - @technitrain

4. Method Overloading in WCF: WCF Interview Series #1

By Microsoft Integration MVP Dhananjay Kumar - @debug_mode

5. Bug Check 0116: VIDEO_TDR_ERROR Troubleshooting Tips

By Windows Expert-IT Pro MVP Shyam Sasindran - @Captain_MVP

Powerpoint 2013: Visualizations Part 2: Creating Data Infographics with Charts and Graphs

MVP Award Program — Mon, 13 May 2013 15:49:00 GMT

Editor’s note: The following post was written by PowerPoint MVP Glenna Shaw

PowerPoint 2013: Visualizations

Part 2: Creating Data Infographics with Charts and Graphs

In Part 1 of this series, we discussed creating data infographics using shapes. In this part we’ll take the next step and use the features of PowerPoint 2013’s charting tools to create more detailed infographics. This series of articles assumes you are already familiar with creating and modifying charts in PowerPoint 2013. It also assumes you know how to format, group, combine and align shapes and have read part 1 of this series.

There are four primary techniques for changing charts to infographics in PowerPoint 2013:

1. Put shapes on top of an existing chart. In this scenario, Shady Sam wants to include a slide showing quarterly sales for all cars for the past calendar year. In a typical presentation this would be displayed as a line chart. While accurate, it’s rather boring and the information doesn’t readily stand out to the audience since there’s little familiar context. We can improve the audience’s ability to easily consume the information by simply adding car shapes at the data points, removing the vertical axis and adding data labels. This immediately tells the audience the sales are about cars and shows only the values of interest in direct relation to their points on the timeline road. Notice I’m using orange cars in this instance. This is to avoid confusion with the slides from the previous article where we covered annual sales by car color. We can also make the chart much more legible by removing the slide title and using the chart title, resizing the chart and increasing the size of the text. To create your chart:

a. Use these values to create a line chart.

	Sales
1st Qtr	$1,564,000.00
2nd Qtr	$1,005,000.00
3rd Qtr	$1,128,000.00
4th Qtr	$1,605,000.00

b. Adjust to layout shown.

c. Add car graphics at each data point.

2. Use images for the fill of chart elements. While we’ve significantly improved the plain line chart, we still don’t have a good contextual element for the monetary values. We could place the dollar images directly on top of the graph, but there’s a better and more accurate method. Follow these steps:

a. Add another data series with the same values and label it dollars.

b. Change the chart type to a Combo Chart with the dollar series as a clustered column chart.

c. We now have a combo chart that looks like cars sitting on top of columns. Select the column data series by clicking on the columns and change the fill to the image of a dollar.

d. Change the fill from stretch to stack,

e. Adjust the gap width of the series to make it the same width as the cars,

f. Delete the extra data labels and

g. Center the car shapes over the columns of dollar bills.

We’ve now added the monetary contextual element, but the line no longer looks like a road. Instead the cars appear to be stuck on top of the columns of money and are connected by cables. We’ve lost the feeling of movement and the context of time. To remedy this:

h. Once again change the chart type to a combo chart.

i. Change the sales series to an area chart.

j. Finally, change the fill for the area data series to a light gray.

We’ve regained the sense of movement and the viewers can easily see that Shady Sam’s has a significant drop in car sales during the spring and summer months.

3. Adding elements on a chart background. This is very similar to adding shapes on top of a chart except, in this instance, we hide all the data series graphics and replace it with elements we create. For this scenario, Shady Sam (bless his heart) has decided he wants to see if there is any relationship between the local air quality index and hybrid car sales by quarter. Typically this would be graphed using a cluster or bubble chart. However, unless you’re a data geek, this is also a relatively hard chart to interpret. You can easily see there’s a trend, but you really have to do a bit of mental gymnastics to see that the higher the hybrid car sales, the lower the air quality index (a good thing) and you completely lose the context of time. Even using a line chart or combo chart, the information just isn’t readily grasped.

To clearly display the relationship between the elements, perform the following steps:

a. Convert the air quality index into percentages. To accomplish this we add all our values together and then divide each value by the total to get the percentage for that value.

b. Choose your images. For my example, I’m choosing smoke stacks to represent air quality and the green leaf car image I took apart to create my other car images in part 1.

c. Make the graph a blank canvas by setting the fill and line color for all our data series to No Fill and No Line.

d. Go to fellow MVP Dave Paradi’s Proportional Shape Comparison Diagram Calculation Tool.

e. Calculate the appropriate size for each of the quarterly elements and put them on top of the blank chart.

f. Remove the word index from the title in favor of the more easily understood Air Quality.

We now have a graph that shows us the direct relationship between air quality and hybrid car sales by quarter. Once again, we can readily see that car sales (even for hybrid cars) are lower during the spring and summer months and also that air quality is relationally poorer during those same months.

4. Use images as chart element backgrounds. So far we’ve effectively used shapes and graphical images for our infographics but for a more realistic interpretation we might want to use photographic images. You can easily use a photograph for the fill of elements of your graph like the background, the plot area or the data series elements such as bars, columns or area elements. You’ll just want to make sure to keep the aspect ratio of your photograph by adjusting the fill offsets otherwise your pictures will look distorted. For this example, we’re going to have the picture span the width of all the data series while still showing the individual series elements. To do this we’ll go back to the blank background column chart for the air quality index and make a few adjustments.

a. Change the fill for the air quality index series to Vary colors by point.

b. Adjust the gap width to zero so all the columns are touching.

c. Insert rectangle shapes on top of each of the data series columns.

d. Resize the shapes to be the same size as the series columns.

e. Fill each rectangle with a different shade of gray and set it at 75% transparency.

f. Apply a 5% soft edge to each rectangle.

g. Group the rectangles to be one shape (to enhance the smog effect).

h. Check the box in the format shape pane to maintain aspect ratio.

i. Change the chart’s data series back to no fill.

j. Copy/paste a duplicate of our transparent columns.

k. Ungroup the duplicate copy of our columns.

l. Merge the rectangles to become one custom shape.

m. Fill the newly created shape with a picture that’s in context with the data. For this example I’ve used a smoggy picture with a lot of cars.

n. Apply a 10 % soft edge to the custom shape.

o. Assemble the infographics by placing the custom shape on top of the chart background,

p. Place the transparent rectangles on top of the custom shape and

q. Place the hybrid cars on top of that.

To easily reorder the elements on your slide, click the home tab and click the selection pane in the editing group. I’ve used an image from the internet for my hybrid car and used the background removal tool to eliminate the background. I’ve also applied a gradient fill to the plot area of the chart to further emphasize the difference between the smog and blue sky. If you’re using images from the internet as I have, be sure to follow copyright laws. As you can see I’ve made sure to credit my photo sources in the lower right corner of the slide.

The result is a very polished and realistic infographic showing the air quality to hybrid car sales relationship.

This concludes part 2 of the series on Visualizations: Creating Data Infographics with Charts and Graphs. In part 3 we’ll discuss using SmartArt and Marketplace Apps to create infographics.

About the author

Glenna Shaw is a Most Valued Professional (MVP) for PowerPoint and the owner of the PPT Magic Web site and the Visualology blog. She is a Project Management Professional (PMP)
and holds certificates in Knowledge Management, Accessible InformationTechnology, Graphic Design, Cloud Computing and Professional TechnicalWriting. Follow her on Twitter.

About MVP Monday

The MVP Monday Series is created by Melissa Travers. In this series we work to provide readers with a guest post from an MVP every Monday. Melissa is a Community Program Manager, formerly known as MVP Lead, for Messaging and Collaboration (Exchange, Lync, Office 365 and SharePoint) and Microsoft Dynamics in the US. She began her career at Microsoft as an Exchange Support Engineer and has been working with the technical community in some capacity for almost a decade. In her spare time she enjoys going to the gym, shopping for handbags, watching period and fantasy dramas, and spending time with her children and miniature Dachshund. Melissa lives in North Carolina and works out of the Microsoft Charlotte office.

Friday Five - May 10, 2013

MVP Award Program — Fri, 10 May 2013 16:43:00 GMT

1. How to turn ON/OFF the Microsoft Two-Step Verification?

By Silverlight MVP Kunal Chowdhury - @kunal2383

2. Windows Phone 8 navigation part 2-routing, route details, tombstoning-and testing

By Windows Phone Development MVP Joost van Schaik - @LocalJoost

3. Clash of the Clouds Follow-up

By Windows Azure MVP Bill Wilder - @codingoutloud

4. Hyper-V Recovery Manager on Windows Azure: Game changer in DR architecture

By System Center Cloud and Datacenter Management MVP John Joyner - @john_joyner

5. PowerPivot Workbook Size Optimizer #powerpivot #tabular

By SQL Server MVP Marco Russo - @marco_russo

Windows 8 Super Hackathon

MVP Award Program — Thu, 09 May 2013 21:02:00 GMT

MVPs from around the world gathered in Belgium to judge and participate in the Windows 8 Super Hackathon. Nearly 200 developers amassed to test their skills building Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 applications. A small group of MVPs were asked to participate as judges for the event.

The hackathon coding ran for approximately 16 hours, from 08:08 in the morning until 23:30 at night. An estimated 40% of the attendees were students, many of whom also attended TechDays a few weeks earlier.

The event was captured heavily by national press, including newspapers (De Tijd (Belgium's first business & economic journal), Het Laatste Nieuws, Het Belang van Limburg), radio (Radio 2), and other periodicals (DataNews (Dutch), Solutions Magazine (French).

The Windows 8 Super Hackathon also generated a great deal of social buzz, with over 400 tweets in a day by 86 contributors using the hashtag #superhack .

3 winners were selected by our jury, based on app completion and several quality criteria including app pitch, app potential in the Store and cloud connection:

1st place went to the Fit Beast app, a management interface for your Fit Bit device, developed by Denis Huvelle and his colleagues.

2nd place was awarded to Finds, an app that helps you discover places to eat, drink, enjoy nature, find a party, etc. in Flanders, which was developed by a team of students (Team 6tiict), led by Tom Dupont.

The 3rd place winner was Ataxx! , a classic board game in the style of Reversi and Go, built by Peter Van Weert.

Congratulations to the winners and all the participants! If you're inspired to create a Windows app, take a look at the Windows App portal and look for future hackathons in your area.

PowerPoint 2013: Visualizations

MVP Award Program — Mon, 06 May 2013 15:36:00 GMT

PowerPoint 2013: Visualizations

Part 1: Creating Data Infographics with Shapes

We’ve all sat through presentations that contain slide after slide of charts and graphs. The chart may be well designed and clearly display the data, but still, all it’s displaying is the data in relational context. Either the speaker or the audience or both are required to perform the thought processes to turn that information into something meaningful.

In the hierarchy of knowledge, data moves to wisdom in three steps:

· From data to information by applying context

· From information to knowledge through analysis

· From knowledge to wisdom through action

While charts apply relational context to your data, your audience is still required to perform the analysis of what they are seeing. Consider the following scenario: A car lot has 30% red cars, 20% blue cars and 50% yellow cars. In the last year, blue cars account for 50% of sales, red cars 30% and yellow cars 20%. In a typical presentation this data might be displayed like this:

While the data is accurate, this display of the information requires a lot of work on the viewer’s part to draw conclusions. In other words, turn the information into knowledge. They need to bounce back and forth between the charts comparing the data multiple times.

You could significantly improve the display of the information by simply combining them into a column chart. However, you’ll lose your color context in order to display the two series clearly. If you switch your data rows/columns in order to keep the color context, the comparison isn’t much better than the pie charts.

Prudent use of Infographics allows us to not only put the data in context but, through the use of the familiar, display some level of analysis that the audience can grasp in a glance. Rather than use traditional charts, by combining familiar car shapes and dollar images, we can display the data in a format that allows the audience to quickly analyze the information and make informed decisions for action (wisdom).

This Infographic immediately tells the viewer:

· You’re understocked on blue cars by 30%

· You’re overstocked on yellow cars by 30%

· You’ve got the right amount of red cars

The viewer can easily determine the actions needed:

· Stock 30% more blue cars

· Take actions to increase sales of yellow cars

There are a six easy steps to create your own data infographics using shapes in PowerPoint 2013:

1. Find your graphics. In the example above, I simply inserted some clip art images and then ungrouped them to remove the parts I didn’t want. I then regrouped them and changed the colors to fit my information. If you cannot find a graphic, you can easily create your own in PowerPoint 2013 using the improved Merge Shapes feature on the Contextual Drawing Tools tab. You can learn how to merge shapes by reading this Office.com article. I also suggest checking out fellow MVP Julie Terberg’s article on Custom Shapes Made Easier with PowerPoint 2010. Although it is an earlier version of PowerPoint, she does a great job of walking you through the steps to create your own custom shape. If you don’t have the time or tolerance to create your own graphics, I recommend Get My Graphic. Other stock image companies are great for pictures and design, but Get My Graphic has an amazing library for infographics and the graphics are easily customized to meet your needs.

2. Figure out your ratios. In my example, it was pretty easy for me to use one car and one dollar to represent 10%, but real data is rarely that cleanly divided. If you don’t need to be exact and general values are ok, by all means do round up/down to make it easier to figure out your ratios. If however, you need to display more accurate values, check out MVP Dave Paradi’s Proportional Shape Comparison Diagram Calculation Tool. Yes, that’s a mouthful, but it does perfectly describe exactly what the tool does. While you may not choose to display your elements laid out as Dave has, use the tool to determine the sizes you need for your objects. If you find you need to display only a portion of a shape, you have two choices: save the shape as an image and crop it to size or use two colors on your shape and set one of the colors as your background color. See the next step for color coding.

= 60%

3. Determine your color coding. In my example I used red, blue, yellow and green as my colors. This might be an issue for persons who are red/green color blind since red and green look like the same color for them. However, in my example, it’s the dollar signs that are green and the cars are red, clearly differentiating the information by shape as well as color. Additionally I was able to use a single color for each of my objects, but you may find you need to display your object with two or more colors to accurately represent your data. See this Office.com article for applying gradients to shapes. And MVP Echo Swinford has an excellent tutorial on Creating Gradients in PowerPoint 2007. Again, although it’s about an earlier version of PowerPoint, the gradient interface is essentially the same and Echo gives the best explanation on how to use it.

= 30% blue, 70% red

4. Determine placement of your shapes. Arrange your shapes so that they’ll clearly display the information but retain their familiarity for the viewer. In my example, I chose to use the dollar bills as a “road” metaphor for the cars. If I had stacked the bills next to the cars it wouldn’t have been as effective. I did toy with arranging them all in a straight line but, while it looked cool, the data wasn’t as clear as each set of cars/dollars arranged vertically. Smart Guides, introduced in PowerPoint 2010, make it easier than ever to align shapes. Read this PowerPoint 2013: Smarter Guides article to learn how much better they are in PowerPoint 2013 and how to use them.

5. Determine your background and slide placement. You want to be very careful with this step. You can easily obscure your information if your background is too busy. Your background should enhance and add context to your infographic as opposed to obscuring the information. Since most slide backgrounds are determined by your template, you’ll want to choose your template carefully or make your own. If you regularly create presentations, you should seriously consider getting the book:Building PowerPoint Templates Step by Step with the Experts. Placement on the slide is also important. As you can see in my example, I placed the primary infographic in the lower right quadrant. In most cases this is the weakest position on a slide. The upper right and center areas are the strongest positions on a slide for most languages because they are read left to right, top to bottom. I overcome this constraint through the use of vivid colors on my primary infographic and duller colors on my background graphics. When viewing the slide, your eye is immediately drawn to the infographic of the brightly colored cars.

6. Finally, follow the KISS principle. KISS stands for Keep It Simple, Stupid. Avoid over-cluttering your slides with text and elements that add no value. You want your audience to absorb the information at a glance, not have to visually wade through a bunch of junk to find it.

So that concludes this part on Visualizations: Creating Data Infographics with Shapes. In part 2 I’ll cover how to create Data Infographics by modifying charts and graphs.

About the author

About MVP Monday

Friday Five - May 3, 2013

MVP Award Program — Fri, 03 May 2013 21:03:54 GMT

1. TFS Live app for Windows Phone

By Visual Studio ALM MVP Jeff Bramwell - @jbramwell

2. Setting up Enterprise Resource for Managing your Test VM Environment

By Project MVP Michael Wharton -

3. Pasting a Formulas Static Value in Cell Below

By Excel MVP Tom Urtis - @TomUrtis

4. Understanding Hyper-V Error Messages

By Virtual Machine MVP Aidan Finn - @joe_elway

5. Loading the partial views using Ajax for Beginners

By ASP.NET/IIS MVP Brij Mishra -

New Features in Outlook.com

MVP Award Program — Thu, 02 May 2013 22:50:39 GMT

Xbox MVP William Devereux chats with Outlook.com Marketing Manager Galileo Vieira about the new Outlook.com

(Please visit the site to view this video)

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 and Office 365

MVP Award Program — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:23:11 GMT

Editor’s Note: In partnership with Microsoft Press, MVPs have been contributing to an ongoing guest series on their official team blog. Today’s article is from Office 365 MVP Sean McNeill which is the 27th in the series

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 and Office 365

Background

Corporate Data Loss has become a major issue for almost every company. If a company has not suffered from Data Loss, either through an external malicious attack, employee error, or even worse employee deliberate action; most are very aware of consequences of a Data Loss. These consequences include such things as fines, lost trust from customers/clients, payment of credit monitoring services, and many other items that could severely impact a company’s bottom line or worse, its future.

McAfee has written a White Paper Title, Data Loss by the Numbers, where they have analyzed data from the Open Security Foundation’s Data Loss Database. The White paper records such items as the below list of high profile Data Loss examples:

The White Paper also reveals a striking chart (shown below) that shows the types of breaches (Data Losses) and records compromised by the breaches:

As you can see above, while just over half of the breaches were from External, the Malicious Insider and Accidental Insider combined percentages nearly reaches half! This explains that having a perimeter security, firewalls, Intrusion detection, etc. is not only important, but it is also just as crucial to prevent employees from either maliciously or accidentally contributing to a Data Loss.

Exchange 2013 Data Loss Prevention (DLP)

With the release of Exchange 2013 for on-premises and the new Office 365 (Wave 15, based on the 2013 product sets), Microsoft has now included DLP into the core of the Server and Service. With this release, companies can put safeguards in place to prevent Data Loss via email messages.

Continue reading full article here

About the author

Sean McNeill is a Cloud Services Specialist with Catapult Systems. Sean has over 15 years of professional experience with the last 11 in Microsoft Infrastructure technologies. His primary areas of expertise are Windows Server, Microsoft Active Directory, DNS, Exchange, PowerShell and virtualization with Hyper-V. Sean’s role with Catapult makes him responsible for all things Office 365. Sean has done numerous Microsoft Infrastructure assessments, Active Directory domain consolidations and migrations and Exchange 200x to Exchange 2010 migrations. He has worked with Microsoft Online services over the past four years with BPOS and now Office 365. Clients that Sean has worked with range from small 50 seat organizations to large companies with over 10,000 seats worldwide. Sean currently holds two MCITP certifications and six MCTS certifications. Sean was awarded as an Office 365 MVP by Microsoft on July 1, 2012.

About MVP Monday

Friday Five - April 26, 2013

MVP Award Program — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 20:49:35 GMT

1. Windows Azure Bootcamp is Coming Soon

By Visual C# MVP David Giard

2. Notes from the Field: Exchange 2003 to the New Office 365 (Wave 15) Migrations

By Office 365 MVP Sean McNeill - @S_McNeill

3. Microsoft Using Crowd Sourcing in their Windows Compatibility Center

By Windows Expert Consumer MVP Richard Hay - @WinObs

4. The New Face of Total Domination: Windows Azure – IaaS @ General Availability

By Windows Azure MVP Magnus Mårtensson - @noopman

5. Understand the startup form (or main form) in C#

By Visual C# MVP Rod Stephens