24 Conditional Formatting Visuals in Microsoft Excel that Should Be Retired

“You should go work at Microsoft and fix Excel’s terrible formatting.” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this from workshop participants. Bill Gates, are you reading this?? Microsoft Excel is lonnnnng overdue for some updates. Don’t get me wrong—it’s still my favorite program. With 750 million users worldwide, I won’t be switching to anything else. It’s used by every business professional I know for at least part of their workflow. I’m getting tired of making excuses for Microsoft. Here are 24 conditional formatting visuals that should be retired ASAP because they’re ableist, time-consuming to read, or look like they’re from 1995.
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How Drawing Makes Us Better at Data Visualization

“Which software program is best for data visualization???” This is one of the most common questions about getting started with graphs, charts, and diagrams. There are plenty of great software programs, like Excel and Tableau—and even PowerPoint! There’s also a lesser-known secret to creating strong data visualizations: hand-drawn sketches.
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The Data Strategy Show with Samir Sharma

How can we design the best possible dashboards for business leaders? I addressed this question on the Data Strategy Show with Samir Sharma. We talked about challenges companies face when trying to visualize data, what we should be thinking about when creating or re-designing dashboards and how to learn more about data visualization as a whole.
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Getting Started with Sketchnoting: A Conversation with Emily Mills

I recently had the chance to talk with Emily Mills, who is a professional illustrator and expert in sketchnoting. Emily was a guest speaker in our Report Redesign course. She walked us through the basics of sketchnoting, her career, why hand drawn images stop the scroll, the cool brain science behind sketchnoting, and then led us through some drawing exercises.
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Getting Started with Google Sheets: Conversation with Ben L. Collins

I recently had the chance to talk with my longtime friend, Ben L. Collins, who is THE Google Sheets instructor. Ben joined as a special guest at Office Hours (special live sessions for full course students where we share ideas and give feedback on each other’s projects). Ben shared about his consulting and training work with Sheets, and his personal take on Sheets – favorite features, surprising features, and so on. The personal insights and reflections you can’t learn just by googling something.
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Women in Data

In September, I was invited to speak at a Women in Data panel alongside Rebeca Pop. Women in Data is an international non-profit organization started in 2015 whose mission is to bring women together for career advancement and an opportunity to uplift one another. We talked about our start in data visualization, how to approach data viz problems, data integrity and ethics, how get started (and stand out) in the data viz world and what we see coming in the future for the data viz world.
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