Most financial slides show an absolute number and its percentage growth for things like revenues, gross profit, operating profit, and operating income. But they also show margins: operating profit, gross profit, operating income as a % of sales. If the gross margin grows from 50% to 55%, is that 5% growth, or 10%?
Microsoft did it right in its last earnings presentation: explicitly name increases in margins as ‘points’. So going from 50% to 55% gross margin is a 5 points increase. See the example slide below
Mmm, now that we have a slide here, let’s talk about it. What is good:
Clean font, clean layout, even without a logo
Numbers are rounded up
What could improve:
Use the full space of the slide, the table (probably coming out of Excel) is tilted to the left
The titles of the table are a bit “heavy” with that blue colour splashed on them. It is better to use an accent colour to highlight a piece of data that is important for your message
The dark grey font on light grey background looks sophisticated, but hurt the contrast that is important in financial slides
In SlideMagic, I put the following together quickly (in the SlideMagic spirit)
What did I do?
Use the entire slide
Accent colour is used for important data
Light column headings
Re-shuffled the order of the table items, yes, gross profit and gross margin are related, but I think it works better to group billions and margins
Add small bar charts to highlight the comparison of the growth numbers
I have added my slide to the template bank, you download it for free, or simply search for ‘Microsoft’ from within the SlideMagic app.