Why Your Neglect of This Reporting Tool May Be The Biggest Business Growth Mistake… You’re Making.
PowerPoint?Â
Yes!
You may have been enchanted by the beauty of PowerPoint as a presentation tool… But, do you know that you can use PowerPoint to create awesome business reports? Business reports that are attractive and takes less time to create than a spreadsheet report. Most organizations assume that since business reports are a critical and integral part of their growth, it should be factual, straight-faced and forward.Â
Well, that’s the problem lies… Whatever happened to engaging, colorful business reports? You see, business reporting shouldn’t be one big tasteless, bland piece of business. While precision, simplicity, and conciseness are important… These stoic, barefaced ways of reporting… actually, wear off the humanness that makes business reports interesting. A lot of businesses and organizations are now realizing about this missing link… that’s costing them a lot in engagements and growth.
So, they are working hard to make sure they inject these human elements into their reports, stir excitement and capture stakeholder interests at the same time… Now, which business tool do you think they are running with to achieve their goal? Good guess! It’s your good ol’ reliable PowerPoint. There are a lot of features that make PowerPoint jigsaw-fittingly perfect for business reporting… These features translate into some bunch of amazing benefits which I’m about to share with you in this article…
Let’s dig in:
1. Easy to Use
Packed with amazing options, tools, and an intuitive work environment; PowerPoint is easily more appealing to work with than, with a spreadsheet. You’d bet, it’s more interesting to be facing a television screen than a never-ending bunch of rows and columns. PowerPoint makes it easy for you to create sophisticated and visually enhanced reports… You can easily use it to create simple charts, add other visually optimized elements to make your report pop.
You can use more colors options and combinations to make your report eye-catching and attractive. This will give you the advantage of tapping into the psychology of color to elicit the desired emotional response in your stakeholders. Research has shown that using the right combination of colors, you can influence decision making and aid persuasion… So, by using the right combination of colors in your reports, you’d be able to psychological and subliminally influence your stakeholders to your ideas.
That’d be quite awesome, isn’t it? Spreadsheet tools don’t offer you this privilege. PowerPoint does.
2. Flexibility
The flexibility of PowerPoint is quite mind-blowing especially when you remember, it’s just a simple presentation tool. With PowerPoint, it is quite easy to reach all audience types at the same time, with a single business report or presentation. Your visual, auditory and textual audience types.
When you can integrate animations, audio, texts, charts, and videos into your report; you will be able to effectively capture your different audience types, and end up not leaving anything to chance or for misinterpretation.
Research has shown that people would rather watch a video report than read a textual one…
By using PowerPoint to create your reports, you are on the good side, since you are varying your content types to make your content more appealing.
3. Designing Simplicity
One really awesome thing about PowerPoint is that it has almost a flat learning curve. You can just pop it open and start playing around to come up with some cool designs… And even when you think you are deep in some creative dark valleys…
There are abundances of awesomely customizable PowerPoint templates freely distributed all over the internet, that you can kick off with and tweak to your desired designs.
By using these customizable templates, you and your team would be able to whip up some cool business reports in no time.
4. Ease of Distribution
PowerPoint makes media distribution a walk in the park. PowerPoint has a powerful one-to-many feature that makes it so easy to create one PowerPoint report and distribute it in different document formats which are suitable for different platforms… This helps you to gain more reach with your report.
You can convert your business report into PDF files, mp3 and mp4 files… using screencasting add-ins inside PowerPoint.
You can even convert your business report into a website and host it on your server for easy access and distribution over the internet.
Easy distribution means that you can repurpose your business report for various channels, to catch more eyeballs and deliver your goals. This ease of distribution also makes PowerPoint very ideal for digital signage; where its dynamism shines through…
What this means is that you don’t need a compound list of tools to create your business reports and distribute them for digital signage…
Everything can be done inside PowerPoint. Isn’t that awesome?
5. Powerful Add-ins for Heavy Lifting
Even though PowerPoint is already simplistic and easy to use… It is quite spoilt for add-ins… Powerful add-ins that you can use to achieve more in less time, effort or resources…
One of these Add-ins is DataPoint. DataPoint is a PowerPoint Add-In that is quite handy for creating dynamic business reports and presentations for real-time reporting. One of the best tools that businesses and organizations are taking advantage of, for digital distribution. When you are an organization that handles a lot of data, reports and business documents; you become aware of the challenges you face in handling, sorting, and presenting these reports on a daily basis… It does take a toll on your team because it is exhaustive and mentally fatiguing, and these lead to inefficiency and inaccuracy. If you handle very important error sensitive data, then, you’d understand why it is important to have an automated system for handling your data reports in real time.
With DataPoint, data reporting becomes quite easy to handle and manage. All you need to do is plug in your data source into the quite intuitive interface of DataPoint and configure a few simple settings and voila! DataPoint will automatically feed on your data source and build, present and distribute your reports for you every time… Without you as much as raising a finger to do it.
Now, if you have a change in data, DataPoint will automatically update your new data to keep your report current and in real-time. DataPoint simply makes business reporting easy peasy, and as smooth as melting wax. Now, you might think that setting up DataPoint would be one hell of a cracker…
But, it’s not. It doesn’t take time… This is because it was designed with busy, non-techy business people in mind.
And that’s it! Now, you know why you can’t go wrong with using PowerPoint in creating your business reports.
It doesn’t just make it more colorful and appealing to the human side… PowerPoint has awesome Add-ins like DataPoint that are designed to take away the sweat, the frustration, the time and resources of creating reports every single time…
For example, with just a few basic settings, you can link your data source to DataPoint within PowerPoint, and it will generate and distribute your reports automatically.
What could be better than this?
