Say It With Charts: The Executive’s Guide to Visual Communication (MARKETING/SALES/ADV & PROMO)

It is not a good book

It is an excellent book. I recommend this book because the author explains with details how to do presentation with charts and the differences. This information is not easy to find in other books

Good basic information about how to use visuals most effectively. Is clearly an older book - talks about OHP's for example. Would have liked to see these content restructured directly for the world of powerpoint, but a lot of the content still is effective now

This book should be read by every Controller. Even if there are a few years between the first occasion of this book and now, it is still filled with good advice. Huge recommendation!

There's a lot of useful information in this book. The most educational for me is1. Decide what your message is and THEN design your chart. Don't just generate whatever chart Excel will spit out for you, generate the chart that SAYS what you are trying to say.2. Once you know what you are trying to say, there are TRIGGER WORDS that lead you to the correct chart. "Increasing" suggests a time series chart. "More than" suggests an item chart. Etc.3. The author also shows how to highlight certain lines or bars in the chart to draw the eye to the point you're trying to make.4. The exercises are useful for internalizing what you've read and feeling a sense of mastery.As others have noted, the book ends at the halfway mark but the author fills up the last half of the book with pointless illustrations and visuals to communicate concepts. But how many pictures of process flows do you need to see to get the point? And what am I supposed to do with a page full of mazes? So the last half of the book is pointless. For this, I take off a mark.The author has also added a few pages on how to create slides using PowerPoint. But the advice misses the mark by a mile, suggesting you use colored text on a black background, and encourages the use of animations. In fact, black on white has the best readability and animations are more often just self-indulgent play that doesn't improve clarity for the audience.However, the first half of the book is excellent, practial and will give your charts purpose and your presentation clear meaning. These few simple concepts, accompanied by attractively hand-drawn examples, makes the book more than worthwhile.

If you're interested in getting ideas on how to present ideas graphically, this is a good little book. As many other reviewers have pointed out, several of the articles were prepared by graphic designers (some by hand in fact) and not computer graphics packages. If you're looking for suggestions on how to present ideas graphically, this is perfectly fine,... even useful. However, if you're looking for information on how to prepare graphics using Excel, you're out of luck (however, there are dozens of other books that can help you). That's just not what this books is about. Instead, the book gives you several suggestions for expressing the relationship between various activities (flow charts, diagrams, etc) illustrating performance timelines (bar graphs, area graphs, etc), and other information. However, where this book really shines, is in showing you how to incorporate various illustrations into your graphics to make them truly unique and informative. The benefit of this book is in teaching you how to conceptialize and develop unique graphics -- not in telling you how to produce generic off-the-shelf graphics. I'd recommend this book, along with "Information Graphics" by Harris and "Digital Diagrams" by Bounford, to anyone interested in learning more about charts. Overall Grade: B+/A-