This Element is an excerpt from Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story, Updated and Expanded Edition (ISBN: 9780137144174) by Jerry Weissman. Available in print and digital formats.

The #1 killer mistake presenters make with graphics–and what you need to do instead!

The true problem with presentation graphics is that, all too often, presenters take a flood of data, those dense text and highly detailed tables, charts, and graphs, and simply reproduce them, with little or no modification, as presentation graphics. It’s the Presentation-as-Document Syndrome. But a presentation is a presentation and only a presentation–never a document.