How to combine charts and tables in PowerPoint

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Pitching your presentations at the right level is a key factor in how well your insights land. Some audiences need the big picture while others want to dig into details. Often, you’ll be presenting to a room that needs a bit of both. This month, we’ll show you how to highlight your key takeaways without sacrificing the context you need to back up your conclusions.

Enjoy the read!

Start with the big picture, start with a chart

Say you’ve been asked to analyze sales volumes for the last few years. You want to show the big picture, so you use a stacked column chart to concentrate on total sales, while including the contributions of different store types.

The chart reveals an obvious change in the growth trajectory from 2024. You can pick this out nicely with a couple of compound annual growth rate (CAGR) arrows.

A switch from -2% to +12% is a huge story, and your presentation will be an opportunity to explain what caused the remarkable turnaround in 2024, and discuss how it can inform ongoing and future operations.

Add detail, not clutter

One thing that isn’t immediately obvious from the chart is the trend in year-over-year growth rates. The headline 12% annual growth from 2024 to 2027 hides some of the detail. But adding more arrows or annotations would clutter the chart and distract from the top story.

You can achieve a much cleaner result with a simple table.

By lining up the table with the chart columns, the axis labels effectively double as a header row. You don’t need to repeat information and you can communicate additional detail without cluttering the chart.

Avoid overwhelming with too much tabular data

Another feature of the data is the different trends across store types. The supermarket segment saw positive growth even during the period of overall decline, and the main contraction came in the corner store segment.

Your presentation is a chance to help your audience understand the specific trends of individual segments, but what’s the best way to visualize them? You could try extending the table to add yearly growth rates for each data series, but here’s what happens when you do:

Your problem now is that you’ve added so much detail that you’ll overwhelm your audience. It’s your job to select the data that matters for your presentation. And that’s not every datapoint, that’s the key metrics that support your takeaways.

Show your audience what really matters

You won’t help your audience by giving them dense data tables they have to navigate themselves. You’ll help them by providing relevant data that connects intuitively to what they’ve seen before.

You already identified 2024 as the key year in your analysis and split overall CAGR into the periods before and after. This gives your audience a clear reference point, so take advantage of it by showing segment growth for the same two periods, 2020-2024 and 2024-2027.

You can pull these CAGR values into a table and switch the series labels to the right of the chart so that they serve as row headers for the table. You’ve succinctly added valuable insight without diluting the main narrative. An additional benefit is that as the audience naturally views the slide from left to right they will follow your story, from big picture to more granular detail.

Pay extra attention to layout consistency

Combining the communicative power of a chart with the precision of a table can help you tell more powerful data stories.

The advantages are evident, but there are risks. When you’re using multiple elements in one data visualization, you need to pay extra attention to clean layout principles:

• Alignment: Even a small misalignment between the table and the chart labels can cause a disconnect, making it unclear how the elements of the chart and table relate to one another and creating confusion.
• Overcluttering: Just because you can show a lot of data with a table in a compact space, it doesn’t mean you should. Think about which data provides real value for your audience and only show what you need to.
• Color: Conditional formatting can be a powerful tool for highlighting values in tables, but if you’ve already got a chart on your slide, additional colors can be distracting. Limit your use of color to where you really need to highlight something, and make sure there are no conflicts between the colors used on the chart and the table.
• Number formatting: Ensure consistency across the number formatting of all data elements on the slide. If your chart’s CAGR arrows are rounded to the nearest percentage point, then keeping percentages in your tables at the same level of precision will aid comparability.

Combine charts and tables with thinkcell

If you’re a thinkcell user, you can easily create slides that combine charts and tables. Your tables will be perfectly aligned to the series or categories in the chart and will be controlled by the same dataset, eliminating the risk of errors and keeping your visualization accurate, even when you update your data.

Before you start, enable Data Tables for New Charts. Select Enable Data Tables for New Charts from the Tools menu in the thinkcell tab.

With the setting enabled, you can select data series to move from your chart to a table:

1. Insert a new chart, with a bar, column or line chart the most common options.
2. Right-click on the chart data that you want to display in a table.
3. Select Move to Table Row or Move to Table Column.

You can find more information on how to use data tables for charts in our user manual.

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