SDS 064: My best tool

Welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast, and today I’d like to share with you my best, favourite, and most powerful tool that I’ve ever used in my career. You’re probably wondering what it is. You’re probably wondering if it’s R, or is it Python, or is it maybe Tableau, or is it SQL, or is it something else. We’ve covered so many things in our courses at SuperDataScience, so many different tools, there’s so much to choose from. So what is it? What’s this tool that could stand out amongst all others?

Well, this tool is… you’ll be very surprised… drum roll… PowerPoint. This tool is PowerPoint. And I’ll explain why PowerPoint is my favourite tool. It’s actually going to be very obvious once we drill into it a little bit. Let’s think for a second, if you’ve taken even one of my courses, what tool do I use most of the time? That’s right, I use PowerPoint most of the time. I’m presenting everything with PowerPoint in my courses. Well, except for some courses. Some courses I use Keynote, because I was doing them on a Mac. But regardless, it’s like potato potahta, Keynote, PowerPoint. They’re very similar in terms of their functionality. That’s what we’re getting to.

PowerPoint is what allows me to communicate things, allows me to communicate things I want to convey in my courses. And that’s pretty much 90% of my courses are made through PowerPoint. And at the same time, it’s not only just about the courses. If I look back in my career, and even at my education, back when I was doing my Bachelor’s, I was presenting a very complex thesis which I was working on with lasers and how the stability of a laser is affected by certain atomic effects inside the laser itself. And I was presenting to an audience, a technical audience, but I still wanted to break it down into simple things. And I used PowerPoint there again. Then, in my career, I was presenting once about how to use programming in trading, and again I used PowerPoint.

So whenever I look back, most of my breakthrough moments – and another time I was presenting to an audience when I was working in the industry after Deloitte, again I used PowerPoint to convey all my findings. Whenever I look back, all of my breakthroughs were supported by PowerPoint. I can’t say that PowerPoint was the driving force behind the breakthroughs in my career. Of course I used other tools. But at the end of the day, everything ended up in PowerPoint. Everything ended up in that medium in order to be able to convey those insights. And what that stands to say or show is that in our role, in our lives, communication is very important regardless of what you’re doing, especially in data science. Regardless of what tools you’re using, what kind of techniques or methodologies or what objectives you’re trying to accomplish, or you are accomplishing, at the end of the day, presentation is a huge component of your role. And therefore, it’s very important to know how to present well.

And PowerPoint isn’t a very complex tool that you need to master and you need to learn for years in order to know how to use it effectively. The point here is that you can get by with PowerPoint. You can get by and just use it to some extent. But at the same time, you can develop an art, your own of style of using PowerPoint and your own style of presenting and your own style of having PowerPoint support your presentations. You’ll notice that people use PowerPoint in very different ways. Some people put a lot of text on it, some people put a lot of animations, some people put a few images, and so on. There’s lots of different ways and you’ll find that my style, for instance, is just one image at a time, and maybe two images, maybe a little bit of animation.

But the point of having PowerPoint is that it’s supporting my speech. It’s not the other way around. I’m not supporting what’s going on on the slides. You don’t have lots of text or lots of things on the slides and then I’m trying to explain what’s happening. It’s always the other way round. I’m explaining something with my voice and then you see something on the image that supports what I’m saying. But you have to focus on me rather than on PowerPoint. And that’s one of the things I’m talking about when I’m saying the art that you engage in when using PowerPoint. Because it is an art. It’s like painting, or it’s like dance in a way. And once you master that art of using PowerPoint, it’s going to help support whatever you’re doing with whatever other tools you’re using in data science or data analytics. You can always bring it to PowerPoint, and from that point onwards, you will know that “I’ve got the insights, and I already have the skills of presenting and I can rely on the fact that I’ve done this 100,000 times and I know how to convey these insights using PowerPoint.”

So there you go, that’s my favourite and most powerful tool. I know it might be a surprise to some of you, but I honestly from the bottom of my heart think that presentation is a very, very important skill to have in your arsenal. It’s like a must. Presentation trumps anything else every day of the year, and PowerPoint is a very powerful tool to help support that. And you might have amazing skills in R or Python or whatever else. If you don’t have the presentation skills, you’re not going to get far, unfortunately. Because ultimately, data scientists need to be able to communicate. On the other hand, if you have amazing PowerPoint and presentation skills, then you’ll be totally fine even if your R, Python, or other skills are intermediate, simply because you’ll be one of the few who can actually communicate the findings, not just crunch the numbers. So some food for thought for you, how are your PowerPoint skills going, and are there any tweaks that you can do to your presentation style to make the most out of it and actually even better serve your audience than you’re doing already?

And I hope you have a fantastic weekend ahead. Can’t wait to see you next time. Until then, happy analyzing.