Last week, I applied the optimist vs. pessimist style to a map during Office Hours.

(The real version of the map was about a different topic in a different state, but you get the idea.)

The Traditional Map

I’ve written about traditional and storytelling approaches before. You’re probably familiar with this terminology already?

The traditional version would have a topical title and regular ol’ brand colors.

The Storytelling Map: Optimist Version

In this optimist version, we’ve got a:

• “good” takeaway title;
• “good” brand color;
• “good” icon; and a
• call-out box highlighting a superstar.

The Storytelling Map: Pessimist Version

In this pessimist version, we’ve got a:

• “bad” takeaway title;
• “bad” brand color;
• “bad” icon; and a
• call-out box highlighting a laggard.

Which Version Should You Use?

That obviously depends on your audience and context.

You’re welcome to comment here with your own insights. I read every response.

Download These Maps

Want the Excel file that I used to create these maps? You can download it here.

And other times, lower numbers are better.

Here’s how you can add icons and text boxes to graphs to remove that guesswork for your colleagues.

This example was made in Excel – but the techniques can (and should!) be applied to visualizations in all software programs.

Icons can be added with Insert > Icon. You’ll format them like pictures.

Symbols can be added with Insert > Symbol (an entirely different button and menu of options). You’ll format them like text.

In this 8-minute tutorial, you’ll learn similarities, differences, and advanced nuances:

Transcript

[00:00:00] I’m Ann Emery. You’re watching Data Viz on the Go, the series where you learn dataviz time savers inside everyday software like Excel.

And I was just about to record a quick five minute tutorial about. Symbols and icons and how they’re similar but not. And then I found Isla in the hallway. She’s getting ready for cheer practice.

We’re going to cheer Isla, we’re gonna leave in like 20 minutes, you know, that’s pretty soon. And she was like, mommy, can I help you with your YouTube video? And I was like, of course. Of course.

Isla doesn’t wanna talk, but she did agree to show you her Jacko lantern Isla.

Show them, show them. Can you see it? Isn’t that cute? How many are you missing? It’s like three. Three. This one’s kind. That one’s kind of gone too.

Icons are under insert icon. And symbols are exactly where it sounds like, right. Insert symbols. Now, these are the differences that I really want you to know about and [00:01:00] learn from this video.

So Isla, let’s say we wanna insert a cute little shape. So I’m gonna go up to insert and then can you see the duck and the leaf?

Gonna use, oh, the fish. Do you wanna do the filled fish or the outlined fish? Outlined. You know what? We can add both, right? Look, check. Multiple. That’s nice. There’s so many in here. We should look at these all later together ’cause there’s some cute, Ew. Look at that cat.

A caterpillar, A castle. A cauldron. Ooh, a butterfly. Okay, let’s add these first ones. The fish. I think those were a, they look like, uh, finding Nemo fish, don’t they? Okay, so they are not very cute right now. They’re on top of each other, but that’s okay. We can fix them, right? We can like move them to the side.

And should we make ’em bigger? We can format them just like we would any other picture. We can drag ’em. It looks like hands, I think it’s coral. Maybe with some cute little bubbles. [00:02:00] Let’s make them colored. Okay, so once you add your icon or icons, you would click on one. Or both. And then you get this graphics format.

Tap. Do you see this little green one? Right. Graphics format. And then we can change the color like this now purple. Okay. This is like just Microsoft Excel colors. I’m gonna. This one, but I’m gonna change the theme real quick. Just like people here would’ve learned to do in a previous video, and now it’s mommy’s purple.

Do you recognize mommy’s purple? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then here’s mommy’s other colors here, like. The blue. I don’t use the blue and green and fuchsia so much, but that, that’s the pink one. Yeah, like the bright purple. Is that one fun? Okay. These are just like pictures, right? So we can format them like pictures.

We can eyeball a size by dragging the corner, or we can use these exact [00:03:00] measurements. When I’m doing this in PowerPoint, I typically do one inch icons. When I’m doing it in Word, sometimes that looks too big. So typically half inch icons in Word. You can align them. These are all the picture editing things you’d need to do.

You can group them so that they move around together. It’s like two hands, like a little, a little hand, and a big hand. You can also let me ungroup them real quick. So this is possible by default. They’re hanging out over the cells, but you could click on one at a time and then do you see this little thing that shows up?

That says Place in cell. And when I click on that, it kind of like shrinks down and it’s, it’s stuck inside that little rectangle and then Excel. This program we’re in, it adds. Anem. An and what? And Clownfish, it adds this. This is like Excel’s lingo behind the scenes, how it’s kind of coated this [00:04:00] icon. It can’t be edited after that.

Like, look, if you click on it and you say, I don’t want the pink, I want blue. You can’t, you click on it and the, the tabs not up there anymore. So make sure if you decide to place it in the cell, make sure you do all like your colors and everything first. So that by the time, if you need to place it in the cell, it’s, it’s good to go.

Okay? So even though there are anemones, I feel like I’m saying that wrong, and clownfish available. I will tell you in real life, ILA in real life with mommy’s like graphs, I, I don’t get to pick creative ones very often. Usually I’m doing like the one or the two. There are numbers in here, as you can see, one through 10.

Filled and outlined, and then you can edit those like you’d edit pictures like we just did. There are also [00:05:00] symbols where you go to insert, let me put some over here. Pick where you wanna put them. Insert. And you go, go, go. Far right Far right. Icons are towards the left. Symbols are towards the right. Look at that funny little shape.

Isn’t that a cute one? Little. It looks like a head. You’re right. It does look like a head. I was thinking it looks like math symbols and you’re, you’re right. It looks like a head and shoulders. Yeah. Okay. And then look at this one. It pulls up another menu, another of options. Lots of stuff, right? And not as cute.

It’s like more like a, B, c letters, right? All that I use in this, in practice. I mean, do you know mommy studied Spanish and Portuguese a million years ago when I went to a college, I did. And Spanish letters, they, some of them look a little bit different than what we have on our keyboard. So this is where when, when I wrote papers in Spanish, I used these letters in here and then.

A million years ago when I was in high school and I took statistics classes, this is where I got all the math [00:06:00] symbols, was insert symbols. Symbols have been in there since forever and ever.

I use the symbols for the fancy numbers because look, it goes from zero through 20 and there are filled and outlined and small. So it gives you, if you need to do fancy numbers, like a numbered list, like. Three next steps, four action items, three main categories of qualitative data.

Like I use these numbered items all the time. Step one, step two, step three, all the time, every single day. I’m using these in slides and reports. In spreadsheets, in dashboards, section one, section two, section three of the dashboard and so on. And you just get more flexibility with like how many numbers there are.

And if you want them, little or big to find the numbers though, this is our little note I wrote in our cheat sheet. You have to set it to the font saying, Calibri, isn’t that a funny sounding word? And the subset needs to say, ding bats. [00:07:00] That’s an even funnier word, isn’t it?

Weird. That’s weird. That’s weird. Calibri. Dingbats. That’s how you’re gonna see the numbers. There’s lots and lots under there. It’s gonna help you kind of like fast forward and find what you need. Okay? Now the important thing though, to know about the symbols is you format them like text. So if you wanna make it bigger, you have to go to your text section and then you’d make it bigger.

Or smaller. Oh, that’s tiny. That’s too tiny, right? Maybe like that. That’s ginormous. That’s ginormous. It is ginormous. If you wanna change the color, you change the color like you would text. A lighter purple. A lighter purple. Okay, cool. Yeah. And then like this one? Yeah, like more like a lavender. Yeah. You can change the colors.

Now if you put your icons in the cells, that’s all that can be in the cell. You can’t even have two icons in there together. You can have [00:08:00] multiple symbols together. And you can also have, uh, these are, these are like text, right? You could also have words in there too.

You know, you can add words and symbols together in a cell. That’s it. Icons and symbols exist. You find them both in the insert menu, but you format them and customize them a little bit differently. One’s really like an image. A picture one’s really like words, fonts, text.

That’s it. You wanna play Roblox?

Get a snack. Go to tumbling. Yeah. First private lesson. Alright, say bye to everybody. Don’t forget to like, subscribe and share. Bye.

In this video, you’ll learn how Theme Colors show up as:

• Font colors
• Cell background colors
• Icons
• Tables
• Pivot tables
• Charts
• Slicers

What’s Inside

• 00:15 Theme Colors are Branding Presets
• 00:25 Brand Colors as Font Colors
• 00:38 Brand Colors as Cell Background Colors
• 00:51 Brand Colors in Icons
• 01:15 Brand Colors in Tables, Pivot Tables, and Charts
• 01:43 Brand Colors in Excel Tables
• 02:03 Brand Colors in Pivot Tables
• 02:47 Brand Colors in Pivot Charts
• 03:16 Brand Colors in Slicers
• 03:42 Next Video: How to Set Up Theme Colors

Watch it here:

What’s Inside

• 0:00 What dataviz GIFs look like
• 0:36 Step 1: Lay out each frame (in good ol’ PPT)
• 0:57 Only 1 change per frame/slide
• 2:09 Don’t “jiggle” the slides
• 3:53 Step 2: Save each slide as an image
• 4:34 Save as a JPG (white background), not a PNG (transparent)
• 5:03 All the slides get saved in their own folder
• 5:33 Step 3: Upload the images to a free GIF website (e.g., EZGIF.com)
• 6:23 Upload the slides in order
• 6:53 Adjust the frame speed (0.5 – 1 second minimum; longer for first and last frames)
• 8:03 Adjust as needed (e.g., play 3 times and then stop vs. infinite loop)
• 8:27 Step 4: Share! 😊
• 9:12 Alternate solution: Natively within PPT (BUT, can’t adjust settings)

Transcript

Ann Emery: [00:00:00] In this tutorial, I’m gonna teach you how to make a DataViz GIF like this.

This is a before and after that I made just a few minutes ago, because I wanted to post it on LinkedIn.

And it’s really fast. It’s really easy. You can make it all with free software.

I get a lot of questions about like practical stuff like, “wait, you made a GIF?! How?!”

You know, people are on board, they understand the power of simple, engaging visuals like gifs, but then they’re like, “I don’t know exactly how you did that.”

So I wrote out for us the four really easy steps. Let’s do it.

Okay, so step one is you’re gonna lay out each frame. And I use good old PowerPoint for that. So I’m gonna show you behind the scenes it would look something like this. Each frame gets its own slide.

And a couple key tips here. Okay. So you have to make sure that you only have one [00:01:00] change per frame or one change per slide. For example, Let me go big screen so you can see what this would look like.

If you go from this to this, there’s actually two changes there. Do you see the title here? The title? And then the visual. If you jump here, the title changes and the visual changes. It’s a little bit too jarring, a little bit too hard, I think, for people to keep up with that, when like, everything’s changing all at once with the gif.

So you’re gonna need a lot of intermediate slides. You’re gonna need tons of these. You’re gonna probably need twice as many slides, or three times as many slides as you think you need. Okay.

Do you see the progression where it’s only one change at a time? It’s like this. And then second, just the text changes. Third, just the visual changes. Fourth, just the [00:02:00] text changes. Fifth, just the visual changes.

Okay, so you’re gonna need lots and lots of slides. Only one change per slide.

And then the second tip with this is, make sure you don’t jiggle the slides. You don’t want them to look shaky. Okay? So here’s what I mean.

I always make the after slide first. And let me copy this one and I’ll show you what I mean. Okay. Don’t jiggle it. No, no jiggling, no shaking. It’s gonna make people’s eyes roll around in their head and they’re gonna get really angry at you.

Okay, so here’s the after version, and then what a lot of people do is they just add a new slide and they’re like, yeah, I’ll just like.

I’ll just like copy paste this stuff over and they’re clicking so quickly that this one accidentally moves up just a little bit or accidentally moves to the side a little bit. And then when you go from one slide to [00:03:00] the next, do you see how it’s like a little jiggly? It’s a little shaky. Okay. So what I would recommend doing is do a copy of the whole slide.

Like see the little slide previews, you do a copy. And then a paste, and then you change one thing. So I always start with gifs and with a lot of DataViz makeovers like this, I start with the finished version that I know I have to make anyway, and then I delete, you know, I delete one thing, or I just change the text box that’s already there.

I’m not making a brand new text box because you want it to go from one slide to the next and see how the visual, the table itself stays exactly in place. Okay.

It’s these little details that really differentiate, like a homemade blah gif from a really nice, really impressive gif. Okay, so that’s step one.

You’re just gonna open up good old PowerPoint. You’re gonna lay out each frame across different slides.

And then step two is also really easy. You’re gonna save each frame or each slide as an [00:04:00] image.

Okay, let me delete these two ’cause we don’t want those to go into the final version. Okay. You can be clicked on any of any of these slides.

You’re gonna do a file, save as, and let me put it in my folder. I’ve got actually not that folder, I’m gonna put it in. This folder for the second tutorial of the day. Okay. By default, a PowerPoint is gonna save as a PowerPoint, but we don’t want it to be a PowerPoint. We want it to be an image file. So you go to save as type, and there’s a few different types of image files.

I will tell you jPEGs are the best for gifts because then it saves a white background where PNGs save a transparent background. And if you share your GIF someplace on a white background, but then somebody looks at it on a black background, like I have my computer set to white background, but then my phone often has a black background.

It’s gonna look funny. Okay, so you [00:05:00] want a jpeg, you want the white background like this.

Then you do a Save and PowerPoint’s, like, which, which slide? Which, which slide or slides? And you want all, you want all slides to turn into JPEGs. And then this gobbly go is just saying, we made a separate folder for you.

And you’re like, thank you, thank you so much. That’s so sweet of you. Okay, it looks like nothing happened. But then what you’re gonna get is you’re gonna get a folder. With all of those images, seven of them in this case. Okay. Step three is you upload your images to a free GIF website. Now there’s a bunch of free ones.

Uh, the one that I used in the past for years, it doesn’t exist anymore, so I’m gonna show you the new one that I use now. It’s called Easy gif. You can just go to Google though, and like. Make a free gif and you’re gonna find a million options here. Easy GIF is great though. It’s got all the [00:06:00] editing stuff you’d ever want, okay?

Easy gif.com. We’re gonna head to their GIF maker and then we’re just gonna upload those files, the little jpeg files that we have. They are, let’s see, where is my folder? Right about here.

Okay. When you open up your folder, I recommend clicking on the slides in order. So don’t click on this one first, and then this one, you know you’re gonna start here, and then you’re gonna click on them in order so you don’t have to manually sort them or manually drag them in the right order. Later you say, okay, you upload.

Okay.

It takes about this long, you know, maybe 10 seconds, 15 seconds. Okay. And then on this screen, I do highly recommend adjusting the delay between each slide. Now, [00:07:00] 20 throws people off. They’re like, what is a 20? Well, it’s in. Parts of a second. Okay. So I would recommend the first picture, the first frame. The first slide is the longest.

Maybe even something like two seconds so people can just like see what they’re even looking at, you know? So if it shakes too much, people get angry. They’re not gonna like your gif. It needs to go a little bit slower than you may anticipate, and the, the fastest I ever do is a half second between slides.

I’m gonna do a full second here. You know what? And let me save myself some time. Let’s set these all to be a full second, and then the first one, and probably the last one are gonna be a little slower. Sound good? Okay. I would say half second minimum. Probably more like a full second is gonna be, uh, better for a lot of your audiences.

So they don’t look at it and say, what is this flashy thing? It’s like, I’m getting a seizure looking at this. We don’t want any of that. And then you just say, make a [00:08:00] gif. Okay? And then you’re gonna see it down below in just a moment.

Here’s your preview if you don’t like it, if you want longer transitions, if you want it to play.

Three times and then stop. You can change all that. You would just click make a gif a second time or a third time as you make your edits. Okay, and then I’m just gonna save as, save image. As you know, you pick your folder, et cetera, where you want it to go.

And then step four is you get to share it and you can share it.

Anywhere that you’d normally share gifs. So on social media sites, a lot of them let you upload gifs. You know, social media, that the settings change all the time. So, you know, read into your specific, uh, platform before you do it. LinkedIn, which I’m on a lot obviously lets us do gif. You can share it in a website.

It can be embedded in a website. It can be shared in a PowerPoint slide. It can go in a [00:09:00] report like a Word document, but then if or when you PDF it, the GIF doesn’t show, right? It turns back into statics. So it may take a little bit of experimenting to kind of see which formats you can share gifs in.

All right, an alternative solution, because I know at least one of you is thinking this.

A lot of people are like, “Ann, you don’t even have to use EZGIF. You can actually make gifs natively in PowerPoint.”

And yes, you can make gifs natively in PowerPoint, but it is not my favorite. So I’m gonna show you for kicks how to do that, but then I’m gonna show you why I, I don’t like doing it.

Let’s go back to PowerPoint and I’ll show you the thing that’s very tempting. It’s very tempting to do this. If you go to file and you save as it’s very, very tempting when you get to save as type. Remember, we were there a couple minutes ago. It’s very tempting to just pick a gif off this list. Where is my gif?

[00:10:00] Animated GIF format? Okay. That’s what people always say, like, and don’t why? Why don’t you just do that? Just do this thing. Okay, I’ll show you. It’s because you can’t adjust the transitions between the frames. Okay. Where is the one I just made? It would be right here. Okay. You don’t get to adjust how many seconds.

It just gives you the time. That it, it gives, which is a little bit too fast in my opinion. It doesn’t let you add more time to the first frame or more time to the last frame. It’s just the, the timing that is there. Okay? So yes possible in PowerPoint with the caveat that you don’t get all the editing features that you would probably wanna have with a free site like EZGIF.com.

Have fun making your gifts, and when you make one, please tag me. Please comment below this video. I can’t wait to see what you make.

Transcript

[00:00:00] I wanna show you a really fun way to use maps.

And, as usual, you can do this inside everyday software like Excel and PowerPoint and Word.

So a few hours ago I was on a client call and I looked at their before version of a table and it looked like:

this.

It was just a black and white table, and they were like, “Ann, we wanna keep it as a table, but it can’t be so boring. We don’t want it to put people to sleep.”

Now these are obviously nobody’s real numbers. These are obviously nobody’s real hospital names, but the table did look like this with one column per location.

And the locations in real life were in different countries around the world.

So here is the idea that I shared with the client, and I wanna share with you too:

adding maps as icons above each column of the table.

In their real slide deck, and their real report, They had many, many tables like this, comparing the hospitals and showing all the data.

So you could [00:01:00] obviously repeat the little country icons, the little country silhouettes over and over and over throughout the slide deck and throughout the report for nice consistency.

Now you could use them in dark brand colors. This is Ann Emery’s brand purple that you probably recognize.

And try playing around with it. You know, adjust the colors ever so slightly. You can also try lighter versions of your brand colors and you can also try gray. Okay.

Now, this isn’t the only way to visualize this table, but it is the fastest.

This whole thing took me maybe 10 minutes max to make from start to finish.

I just made it in Excel and then I pasted it into PowerPoint.

As usual, If you have any how to questions, comment down below, and I will certainly point you in the right direction.