How PowerPoint sabotages your poster (and how to fix it)

PowerPoint is the software most commonly used to make conference posters, by a long way. Here’s a few ways that PowerPoint works against you when you are creating a conference poster.

Size limits

PowerPoint will not make a page bigger than 56 inches along either edge. 

I have usually used a large format printer than is restricted to 42 inches along one side (usually poster height). But I have used many poster boards that are substantially more than 56 inches wide. Some poster boards are 96 inches wide. Which means a PowerPoint poster only uses 58% of the available space. I want to use all the space available to me!

Unfortunately, this cannot be fixed within PowerPoint. But there is a workaround.

Figure out the aspect ratio of your available space. Let’s say it’s 72 inches wide by 48 inches high (6 feet by 4 feet, a 2:3 aspect ratio). Divide 56 inches (PowerPoint’s max) by the longest edge (72 inches) to find the scale: 77.78%. Multiple 48 inches by 0.7778 to get the height in PowerPoint, 37.33 inches. 

(You could also use one of many resizing calculators on the web to do this math.)

In PowerPoint, create your custom size: 56 inches by 37.33 inches.

Export your final poster as a PDF. Then, when you print the PDF, you should have the option to select “Custom scale” to enlarge your poster to the final size you want.

Using the example above, 72 divided by 56 equals 128.57%.

PowerPoint resizes text and changes line spacing without telling you

Several PowerPoint templates have space for text with an option, “Shrink text on overflow” turned on. If you change text within that text box, PowerPoint will shrink text and / or change the line spacing to make the text fit in the box you drew. 

In some cases, the line spacing will come down to less than single spacing. Most accessibility guidelines strongly recommend more than single spacing, so coming down to a line space of 0.9 or 0.8 is just horrible for readability.

In a couple of templates, changes in one text box may automatically carry over to all the other boxes. So if one box is badly typeset, the other one will be, too.

When you put text into a box, sometimes a small little icon appears in the lower left side that will provide you with text fitting options.

PowerPoint’s rescaling means that you can have a hodgepodge of inconsistent sizes and spacing scattered over your poster. On a series of slides, this might not be so bad, because the audience only ever sees one slide at a time. But when all your pieces are text are visible at the same time, it becomes noticeable.

If you draw a text box on a blank slide, the default option is “Resize shape to fix text.” Not helpful if you have an exact space on your poster that you need to fill, like a single column.

Here’s where the autofit options are if you don’t see that pop-up icon.

You can turn off these autofit options, but there does not appear to be any way to make any one of them the default. You have to do it for each text box individually. This can be tedious, since a conference poster usually has many individual text boxes.

Automatic borders around text boxes

I mentioned this in a previous post, but it’s worth revisiting. Alignment is one of the basic elements of graphic design. PowerPoint makes it difficult to align text with edges of almost any other graphic element.

This can be fixed by setting margins to zero.

 Again, I’m not sure that there is a way to set zero as a default.

No filtering for fonts

PowerPoint lists all fonts alphabetically. It doesn’t allow you to select, say, the serif fonts or bold fonts or script fonts or variable fonts. When I am making a poster, I often want to use a sans serif for the main text, but I don’t want to use Arial or Helvetica or Calibri or Aptos again. So you spend more time scrolling through font options than if you could just select a checkbox for “Show sans serif fonts.”

There are font manager apps that can help with this. There is a list of font management apps on Wikipedia, and a quick search for font manager might reveal some more options.

Are these solutions complicated? Yes, but I’m not the one who decided to make a poster in PowerPoint. Don’t get me wrong: I love PowerPoint and use it as a quick graphics editor all the time, but you have got to know it’s limitations.

Waffle charts are an underused alternative to pie charts

I was looking at a poster with a pie chart recently. Like this:

There are a lot of criticisms of pie charts, but this was not a terrible example. But I was struck by how awkward that circle looked in a rectangular space.

Again, this was not a particularly bad example. But if the vertical space is smaller...

The unused space problem gets larger and more noticeable.

Let’s changed our cooked goods metaphor. Instead of pie, let’s try a waffle.

Waffle charts are also sometimes called “unit charts.” Like a pie chart, they show part to whole relationships. Unlike pie charts, you tend not to end up with tiny slivers, and there is far less temptation to try rotating it or adding 3-D perspectives.

And you can reconfigure the shape to different proportions. A percentage can be shown three ways and have no straggling units. This provides you with more options to fit your graph to a space.

All of these could be vertically oriented. That is, 25 rows of 4 columns instead of 4 rows of 25 columns shown above.

And if you are okay with rows or columns having a slightly different number, you have even more options.

So now your space might be filled more like this:

There isn’t a button in PowerPoint to make a waffle chart, but a series of squares is very easy to draw in PowerPoint! For that matter, it should be trivial to do in any graphics package. Once you have done it once, you can keep one as a template that you can use repeatedly.

Can you make a waffle chart in Excel? Yes, with qualifications. Chapter 10 of John Schwabish’s book Data Visualization in Excel contains a step by step description of how to turn an Excel spreadsheet into a waffle chat. Turning a spreadsheet into a graphic that can be pasted into a large format conference poster might be a little tricky.

Reference

Schwabish J. 2023. Data Visualization in Excel: A Guide for Beginners, Intermediates, and Wonks. CRC Press. https://doi.org/10.1201/9781003321552

Critique and makeover: Species richness

Disclaimer: This blog post does not show a conference poster. I hope the lessons are still useful.

This is Figure 7 in a recently published journal article (Wiens 2024; open access, free to read). Click to enlarge!

I don’t think this is an effective figure.

The information is shown purely by text. There is no spatial or colour information displayed.

The box “Clades of same rank” sits closest to information about “Spatial richness,” but the arrow connects it to “Clade-based richness.” This violates our expectations of proximity, that related information is kept together.

Arrows normally indicate causality or time. The only reason they seem to be added here is to fix the problem of showing were “Clades of same rank” belongs. It would look weird to have just one arrow, so everything gets an arrow?

And almost no edges are aligned with any other edge. 

Don’t get me wrong, this is not an easy set of information to organize. The challenge is that there are three big categories, but only one has subcategories. This means that almost any way you slice this, one category will require more space, and you are going to end up with gaps in your figure.

In revising this figure, the overarching goals were to keep the categories equally proportioned and aligned, and to organize the text so that the subcategories were obvious (if possible).

So I messed around in PowerPoint to come up with alternatives.

If we keep to the same style, I suggest this is an improvement:

Now text boxes in a row are the same size and aligned. And the most distracting arrows descending from the title are gone.

Why do we need a background?

While I generally advocate removing boxes, here I think they are useful because they add regularlity. If you remove them, the different amount of text results in irregular shapes.

But again: this is pure text. Why not keep it as such with an organized (but not bulleted) list?

As a PowerPoint slide, this does have a problem in that the right half of the space is going unused. We can fix that by repositioning the title:

We could also fix the empty space on the right by using multiple columns, like the original figure tried to do.

Although as pure text, a tabular presentation might be appropriate for print. Wouldn’t recommend on a slide or poster, though.

But can we make this slightly more visual besides adding superfluous arrows and boxes to text? PowerPoint’s design suggestion threw in a globe for “Spatial richness,” which is appropriate. The other two concepts do not easily lend themselves to a simple icon, but the examples given do!

The example for “Clade-based richness” mentions angiosperms, which are flowering plants. Plenty of flower icons. The example for “Trait-based richness” mentions sex, so male and female icons are used.

At the bottom, a single line points out factors that are common to all three explanations.

This last revision does provide less information than the original. In particular, I gave up on showing the sub-categories in “Clade-based richness.” But this is a summary, not the entire article. I think this would be much better for a slide or on a poster than the original jumble of boxes and lines.

And the moral of the story is: Even figures that have been through a peer review and editorial process can still often be improved!

Reference

Wiens JJ. 2024. Speciation across life and the origins of biodiversity patterns. Evolutionary Journal of the Linnean Society 3(1): kzae025. https://doi.org/10.1093/evolinnean/kzae025

Incoming: Conference accessibility panels at ISMPP 2025

Are you going to be in London this coming January? Then you may be interested in the 2025 European conference of the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals.

I bring this up here because there will be sessions on conference accessibility that I had a small role in planning. Part of those sessions will be talking about how we can make the poster session experience better for people with accessibility needs.

The conference agenda is available. Look for “Making Meetings Better for All” for a brief description of this session.

External links

ISMPP Europe 2025

 

Critique and makeover: Heart emergencies

 Today’s contribution is from Alexandra Millhuff. Click to enlarge!

This poster combines a few elements of the billboard style with a more common three column layout. It’s certainly better than many of its competitors, with more graphics and fewer words. But I think there is room to push it even further in readability and focusing attention.

First, I wanted to clear up the title bar. 

The logo on the left was causing two problems. First, it drew attention away from the title, because it was in the critical top left corner, where experienced readers of English naturally look first. It grabs even more attention because of the high contrast white box and red letters.

The other problem was that although the title and authors are aligned to the centre of their text box, they aren’t centrally aligned with the page overall. It’s been pushed to the right to make space for the logo on the left. This destroys the symmetry that you want in centre aligned text.

I moved the title and authors to the right. I found an all white version of the university logo that got rid of the box and matched the rest of the title bar. The logo is a little smaller, which allowed me to put all of the author info on one line. This creates a little more white space, which helps make the title the focus of the title bar.

Next, I cleaned up the columns. 

I got rid of bullets because they were adding visual clutter. Unless your text is an actual list in a longer section of text, you are better off without bullets. 

There were two alignment issues. Some of the text boxes in the columns on the left and right didn’t align. Here is a close up of the left column, with a vertical line drawn down the page. Notice how the bullets are just to the right of the line in the top text box, sit on the line in the middle box, and are to the left of the line in the bottom box.

Also, the text didn’t line up with the boxes containing the headings. This last point is one that is a good example of how PowerPoint works against you if you’re not careful. 

When you create a text box in PowerPoint, it adds white space around the text by default. This doesn’t matter if you only have text lining up with text. But if you want text to line up next to anything else, the text will be misaligned with other objects. Click to enlarge!

Here is how you fix that problem in PowerPoint. You have to manually change the margins to zero. Under “Shape format,” expand the sidebar. Fine the “Text options” tab and set the margins to zero.

The result of those changes:

Next, I moved the main graphic from the middle to the right. This is one of those decisions that I think some people might disagree with. They might argue that these are results, and so the logical place to put them is after the “Study design” section in the left-hand column.

It is true that the graphic show results, but in practice on this poster, it is acting more as a summary for the project. I say this because it has a big sentence at the top – set in even large point size than the title! And there is no “Results” heading above the graphic.

The problem with a placing a big summary graphic in the middle is that it breaks the reading flow. By moving it to the left, it emphasizes that this is the big take-home message. The title and this graphic clearly get signalled as the most important things on the poster.

Could this graphic stay in the centre? Absolutely. I would put a “Results” heading above it, and probably adjust it so that there is a little more flow in reading, rather than this image taking as much focus as it is.

Next, , I did some more text editing and repositioning. I aligned the take-home sentence above the infographic with the title. I edited the text throughout to make it shorter, and adjusted the position of the text boxes accordingly. These edits included the the message above the graphic, but that will change again... 

I continued to look for places to make cuts.

I made another possibly controversial decision: I got rid of the references. The reason for cutting it out was that the references weren’t referenced. That is, there was no place in the main text they were mentioned. They were functioning more like a “For further reading” suggestion than citations.

I noted that in the graphic, every factor shown had a p value underneath it. And they were all exactly the same p value! Rather than saying the same p value seven times, I cut those and noted the p values in a sentence underneath the graphic.

Lastly, I made some more adjustments to the central graphic. I tried to make the circles more evenly spaced.

Also, I reworded the top take home message. I realized “older women” was inaccurate, because there were two separate risk factors. I had tried to condense too much.

I ran this last version past Alexandra to confirm that my various edits to the text hadn't changed the meaning from what she intended.

Here’s the changes in a movie:

Thanks to Alexandra for being willing to share her poster!

Identifying conferences with ConfIDent, a persitent identifier for academic events

Books have ISBN. Articles have DOI. Authors have ORCID. Institutions have ROR. Until recently, conferences or events had nothing. But that started changing in the last couple of years (Franken et al. 2022).

The idea of serial numbers, or persistent identifiers (PIDs) as they are more commonly called today, is one of those boring but so useful bits of scientific infrastructure. They enable so much data collection that you can get a much clearer picture of trends in fields.

There is now a working identifier for events and conferences called ConfIDent. (Conference IDentification, I see what you did there. Well done, punsters.)

As someone who has been actively campaigning for people to take conference posters more seriously, I think this is an important step. I hope that with this sort of identifier, we could eventually start to answer questions like, how many posters and slide talks are given at conferences every year? How many works are eventually published in journals or elsewhere?

For individual posters, a DOI is the more appropriate identifier. If organizers don’t create DOIs for your poster, you can generate one by uploading your poster on services like Figshare or Zenodo.

If you are a conference organizer, I encourage you to give your next conference an identifier. Broadcast that to your members and tell them what it is and how to use it.

If you are a conference attendee, I encourage you to ask the organizers for the ConfIDent number of the event, share this blog post if they have no clue what that means, and list the ConfIDent number of events you attend in your CV.

Hat tip to Alice Meadows of MoreBrains for pointers here.

Reference

Franken J, Birukou A, Eckert K, Fahl W, Hauschke C, Lange C. 2022. Persistent identification for conferences. Data Science Journal 21(1): 11. https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2022-011

External links

ConfIDent platform (see especially FAQ on requesting a conference ID)

ConfIDent about PIDs: Using DataCite DOIs for Conferences (blog post)

ConfIDent project (completed 2022)

The delight is in the details

Being Canadian, of course I played and watched hockey, although in my case, it was extremely casual and not something I actively followed. But I’ve been watching the creation of the PWHL with interest. The league’s first season did something unusual: none of the teams had names. They were just called by the name of their city or state.

But a few weeks ago, we finally got team names! Here’s a look at the six team logos:

The graphic designers did a bang-up job, I think. And because this is the poster blog, there is a lesson I would like poster makers to think about.

Almost every team sport has numbers on the back of their shirts, tops, jerseys, guernseys, whatever they happen to be called in that particular sport. The PWHL jerseys have them too:

But I have never seen any other league do what the PWHL has done with their jerseys. Every number has a series of small icons running through them. This is the Toronto Sceptres’ jersey:

From a distance, it might look like a raindrop, but it’s an orb (I’ve seen it called the “orb of unity”) that has been pulled from the team logo. You can see the orb better in this close-up of the top of the team logo:

The player numbers for the Boston Fleet get waves, Montréal Victoire players get fleur-de-lis, and so on.

I love this. I love details that reward anyone who takes a slightly closer than usual look. Designers have a phrase for this: “surprise and delight.” If you search “design surprise delight,” you can find many essays about it importance.

Here’s an example of one such detail that appeared in the blog before: a detail hidden in a QR code. QR codes are a great place to put such details, because the code is deliberately quite robust: it can degrade quite a bit and still work.

Other places that you could put in some sort of detail?

Many people use section headings on their poster that follow the journal “IMRAD” format. The headings are often simple boxes of solid colour with one word in them. There is almost always some space for a little detail or two.

While I dislike bullets on posters in general, if you do have cause to use one, you could try some small icon (like the orb above!) instead of a true bullet.

I think there might also be some possibilities to try to take elements of a university logo and put them somewhere else in the poster besides the title bar.

But a skeptical reader might ask: “What’s in it for me?”

How does this help you, a conference presenter? Isn’t a detail, by definition, something that will get overlooked by most people? How will it help you get one more visitor at your poster?

The honest answer is: it might not help you get one more visitor at your poster. This isn’t a technique to get more people. It’s a technique to give those who do stop at your poster a an extra little reward, and one hopes, a better and more memorable experience.

Think of it this way: people at a research conference are inundated with information. They are going to be living in their heads for a few days during the meeting. There may not be all that many opportunities for them to smile at a little detail they spot on a poster. You’re giving your viewer a chance to have an emotion, and emotion is core to social connections. And social connections are the basis for professional connections.

Related posts

Critique: Italian cemeteries
Analyzing the Vaquero logo, or: Who was that tanned man?