Why use an Excel spreadsheet when you could use an infographic instead? My blog earlier this week touched upon the power of using images, not words, to generate excitement and fan interaction on social media. The same idea can be applied to reports, presentations and meetings. The bottom line is this: images are easier to understand, more useful for explaining complicated data, and quite frankly, more fun to look at than a long list of numbers and words.

As PR people, we work in a creative industry and work on creative projects on a daily basis. When it comes to compiling a report of analytics, numbers, demographics and other data, why would we ditch all of our creative instincts and resort to the old standbys: Word documents and Excel spreadsheets? Yes, there is a time and a place for a neat, classic, black and white spreadsheet. But, for the remainder of the time, an infographic, word cloud or beautifully choreographed chart gets the job done just as well, and often even better.

Just this past week, I researched different infographic generators and other creative data compilers to use for a presentation, and I was amazed at the amount of easy to use websites and programs available. Don’t worry if you don’t have a background in design, because with these programs, it’s not necessary to be able to create a top of the line infographic. One of my favorite sites for infographics is Piktochart. Check out this video and see how easy it is to create your own. After all, we are creative people, so shouldn’t our work and presentations reflect what we are capable of doing?