A chart is for a shape, and a table is for a value. Three conditions push you toward a table, and when two of the three hold, the table is usually right.
When does a table beat a chart?
The first is that the numbers will be quoted. A board's minutes will record that radiology revenue was ₹372 crore, and a reader who has to recover that from a bar is guessing. How far off can the guess be? On an axis running 0 to 500 with gridlines every 100, a reader interpolating to about one fifth of a gap recovers a value to within ±20, which is 4.0% of the axis. Radiology's true 372 is read as somewhere between 352 and 392, an error of up to 5.38% of the value itself. And that's with a well-drawn chart.
The second is that the reader is doing lookups. If the question in the room is "what was corporate wellness", the reader wants a row to read off. The third is that the series are few and the categories are few. Five service lines across two years is 10 numbers, and 10 numbers are a table. And 400 numbers are a chart and a summary.
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How do you set a table in PowerPoint?
Setting the table is where most of the damage happens, and the arithmetic isn't kind to the default. Take the Meridian table: 5 service lines plus a total row plus a header is 7 rows, and segment, FY25, FY26 and growth is 4 columns. That is 28 cells. A full grid draws a rule between and around every one of them, which is 8 horizontal lines and 5 vertical lines, or 13 rules. A properly set table uses 4: one above the header, one below the header, one above the total, one at the foot. Nine rule lines go. That's 69.23% of the ink, and all it was doing was drawing boxes around numbers your eye had already separated.
The rest of the setting is small decisions that compound:
- Numerals right-aligned, so the units, tens and hundreds line up and the eye compares lengths without reading digits.
- One decimal place, consistently, chosen from what the reader can act on. What the spreadsheet happened to produce doesn't decide it.
- The label column left-aligned, and the only column that is.
- A sign on every number in a change column, so a fall reads as a fall at a glance, with no subtraction needed.
- Rows sorted by the column that carries the message, unless the order is intrinsic, in which case the intrinsic order wins and the sort is a lie.
- The unit stated once in the header, and never repeated across all 18 of the table's number cells.
- Column heads that are words, because "FY26" is a word and "rev_fy26_cr" is a database.
One more decision separates a table that is read from a table that is stared at. A table on a projected slide should carry one emphasis, applied to the row or the cell the title is about, and nothing else. When every number is bold, the emphasis is worth nothing. When only one is, the reader's eye goes there first, and the layout backs up the title as well as the words do.
Read the sort rule strictly. Sorting a table by value is an argument that size is what matters. Sorting by an intrinsic order, such as the stages of a process or the months of a year, is an argument that sequence is what matters. Sorting alphabetically is almost always an argument that nobody decided.