Blog

How to Hack Excel — and Add Totals to the Tops of Stacked Column Charts

“But you can’t do that in Excel!” Well, maybe you could. In this guest post from Anat Zohar, you’ll learn about three Microsoft Excel hacks: (1) using a scatter plot to create a hex map, (2) adding totals to the tops of stacked column charts, and (3) using symbol fonts.

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Humanity in Data Visualization: Designing a One-Pager for My Grandma’s Caregivers

At the beginning of the pandemic, Mieko Yeh’s family had to fire her grandma’s caregiver due to a personality mismatch. Mieko designed an 11×17 one-pager about her grandma’s needs to share with incoming caregivers.

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Change Takes Time: How to Practice Patience in Report Redesign Processes

Guest author Abby Henderson started to have conversations with her colleagues about how they could change their reporting. She started by suggesting they add more data visualizations and fewer tables. When she met resistance to this idea, she started to produce two versions of the reports. One version included the tables they were accustomed to, and the second version included more elements of data visualization. Through providing both options, Abby was able to slowly garner traction and buy-in on including data visualizations.

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Using Dashboards to Make a Family Trivia Event Even Better

Emily Ross took our Dashboard Design course and is sharing how she uses dashboards to make a family trivia event even better.

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10 Subtle Signs of “Death by PowerPoint”

Death by PowerPoint makes our audience scroll through their phone or lose interest. Important information sits on the slide, gathering dust. We’re all familiar with the obvious signs of Death by PowerPoint: Text-wall slides with bullet points for daaaays. Using filler words (um, like, so). Multiple graphs smushed on one slide with tiny text. Tiny, grainy images with cheesy stock photography models. But are you familiar with the subtle signs of Death by PowerPoint?

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How to Present Dense Data Visualizations (Without Losing Your Audience)

At the Present to Succeed Conference, I talked about about avoiding Death by PowerPoint by storyboarding. Instead of presenting a single graph all at once, we’d explain the graph one piece at a time.

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