Excel changed the world by allowing users to format and beautify data, although this is often at the cost of clarity. This trend is worse with Microsoft Word, where users are bombarded with formatting options. That massive ribbon at the top of the screen is a siren calling to the user to mess about with styles and borders and colours, when they should be concentrating on writing. Historically, writers wrote the content; typists dealt with the formatting, and the limitations of typewriters meant that the writing remained clear.

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There are countless places where you can find tips for better writing. They’ll all say you should be brief. Cut out the waffle and the jargon. The point of cutting your draft is not to make it shorter, but to make it better. Well, sometimes I think you should cut out 100% of a document. Just don’t write it! Instead of less is more it’s a case of nothing is more than enough.

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Why not write your next finance report the Axios way. The Axios mission statement is “Axios gets you smarter, faster on what matters.” They’re focused on the news of course, but as an #accountant or #auditor, don’t you want to get your colleagues or clients smarter, faster? If you do, you need to apply Axios’s four principles to your own writing: 1️⃣ Rephrase sentences to be shorter and clearer. 2️⃣ Reformat paragraphs so what’s key stands out.

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In accounting, substance trumps form. In writing about accounting, it doesn’t. The form of what you write is as important as the substance. Whenever you write something – whether an email, a business plan, a board report or a customer letter – there are three dimensions to get right. Sure, there is the substance, or content, of the document. This is your message, and it is the reason for writing in the first place.

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Excel transformed the world. No question. The first impact that Excel made was nothing to do with its functionality; it was the way it looked. Excel arrived along with the Windows operating system. Excel allowed a user to format cells. You could have borders and bold text. You could make a spreadsheet look good even it all it did was arrange data in rows and columns and sum them. Herein were the seeds of accountants and others focusing on form rather than content.

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But that doesn’t mean that accountants should not improve their writing skills. Accounting is about words as well as numbers. All that classifying and analysing of financial data is pointless if its meaning is not communicated. That’s why I keep writing posts about the need for accountants to be better at writing and presenting. Somehow, we’ve gone from the time when people complained about predictive text because it caused them to send an offensive word to their boss to a situation where people are looking to “write” 2,000 word documents with it.

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Last year a colleague sent me a photo he took during a presentation. The presenter had a slide with a stacked column chart with 24 columns of data that filled the whole slide. The legend was too small to read. Overlaying the central part of column chart was a white box with a pie chart in it. There was an arrow pointing to one of the columns because, I infer, this pie chart was showing in a circle the same analysis of composition as the column.

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Improve your presentations with one simple tactic. You’ve probably heard that you should use storytelling in your presentations but do you know how to do that? Especially in finance. How do stories fit into a budget presentation? Well, you could use the 3-act structure. This means you structure your presentation into 3 parts: The set-up ➡️ The confrontation ➡️ The resolution The set-up is where you introduce the situation to the audience.

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A lot of posts about presentation skills – mine included – are about slides. They are about what your slides should include, what they shouldn’t include, how they are designed, and structuring them into a story. But slides are not presentations. Slides are the supporting media for a presenter. What matters is what the presenter says … and how they say it. I’ve been thinking about this a lot in recent weeks.

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