In this 8-minute lesson, you’ll learn:

(1) how small multiples layouts can help, and

(2) how to make small multiples charts in Excel.

What’s Inside

• 0:00 My goal: Convince you to use MORE GRAPHS
• 0:32 The fictional example: 3 different variables/units
• 1:44 Before: Everything together in one graph
• 2:30 After: Small multiples
• 3:21 How to make small multiples line graphs in Excel
• 4:30 Use the “Select Data” menu to graph 1 variable/unit at a time
• 5:10 Copy-paste to make the additional graphs
• 6:24 Align and group the separate graphs together
• 6:55 1 lonely line? Try an area chart
• 7:30 What it would look like in Word
• 8:09 Recap of key points

Download the Excel File

It’s here.

You might spend a few moments adding and editing the text box.

But then, it doesn’t get pasted correctly into Word or PowerPoint, argh!

In this 5-minute video, you’ll see 2 ways to add text boxes to Excel charts:

1. The sloooow way (adding a text box outside the chart, and then having to do extra editing and grouping)
2. The speedy way (being proactive and adding a text box inside the chart from the beginning)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgoPvIHWuJA

What’s Inside

• 0:00 The problem: Text boxes don’t get copied/pasted into Word or PowerPoint correctly
• 1:02 Dataviz on the Go
• 1:12 Example: Text boxes on small multiples histograms
• 1:55 The long, hard way: Text box is a separate object from the chart
• 2:59 The fix: “Group” separate objects together
• 4:18 The better, faster way: Click on the chart first!
• 5:10 Additional benefits: No grouping; No border; No removing white fill color
• 5:31 Recap

Transcript

Ann K. Emery: [00:00:00] In this video, I’m going to show you how to add text boxes to your graph. Like this.

You might need to add some labels. You might want to add some call out boxes or annotations.

But then I’m also going to show you the correct way to do this because I want your text boxes to come along for the ride as you copy and paste your graph into Word or PowerPoint.

Here’s the problem, right? You add these beautiful text boxes and then you copy and you go into word and you paste and you’re like, where are they?

And people tell me, “oh, I had to take a screenshot.” No screenshots. That is low resolution. It gets blurry. It looks unprofessional. No screenshots. Okay.

Or they say, “I had to copy and paste all of my text boxes separately.” So they’re doing copy, paste, copy, paste like 10 bajillion times. I don’t want that for you either.

I want you to save time. All right. So in this video, I’m going to show you how to add the text boxes the correct way so that they come along into [00:01:00] Word or PowerPoint with the rest of your graph.

I’m Ann Emery. You’re watching Dataviz on the Go, the series where you learn dataviz time savers inside everyday software like Excel.

And speaking of being on the go, I was teaching dataviz in South Africa a few days ago. Uh, the jet lag is mostly gone by now.

And we were looking at how to make column histograms. We were also making area histograms, and we were also making small multiples histograms.

And when we got to the text box section, I was reminded again, that a lot of people don’t know this trick, so that’s why I wanted to make a video about it to share this with more people like you.

All right, let me show you how to add the text boxes, what not to do. Or how to fix it in case you’re doing it the long, hard way.

And then I’m going to show you what to do. The yes version second. Okay.

What not to do? Let me delete these text boxes and I’m going to read them [00:02:00] in case this is new to you. Oops, oops, oops, too far, too far. Click the undo arrow, delete this little one.

Okay. What not to do? Insert. Find your text box. It lives under shapes. It’s also on the far right of your screen. Very similar to PowerPoint and Word, right? You add your text box and you’re like, wait, I thought you were going to tell us what not to do. Here’s what not to do. You like, you, you add your text box, you draw it where you want it, you add all your words, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

It would look something like this over on the side. You would remove the border from it. And then you’re like, great, I’m all done. I’m going to copy. And I’m going to paste and where is it? Where is it? Right? So what happened is your chart and your text box are separate objects. So you’d have to copy paste them individually.

Gross, right? [00:03:00] So if this has happened to you, the fix is just group them. You’ve probably done grouping in PowerPoint where you click on your chart and then you hold down. Is it control or shift? I never look at my keyboard. I just do it by muscle memory. It’s either control or shift. Let’s try control. Yeah, control work.

Did shift also work? Select, hold down shift, select. Okay. It’s both control or shift. I have no idea what the Mac keyboard shortcut is, but if you do comment below the video, share the Mac shortcut for selecting multiple objects with us. So we all know, okay. You’d have both of these selected. You hover your mouse over the border, right?

Not, not so it looks like this shape, but so that it looks like the little arrow shape. You right click and you group and then they are one object. Your two separate objects have turned into one object. They move together, the [00:04:00] location stays there, and then they also can be Copied and pasted together. Okay, now when you paste it, it’s like it’s there.

It’s not formatted, but it’s there. Um, so that works if you accidentally you’re like, where’s the text box? Just group them. Better case scenario that I want you to get in to the gist of doing. I think this saves time in the long run is just proactively trap your text box inside your chart. If you are clicked on some random cell and you insert a text box, your text box is just going to show up like separate.

It’s going to be a separate object, okay? Because you’re just clicked on something else. And then you’re going to have to group them. Just click on your chart first. Click on your chart. It’s activated. Get into the habit of doing that. Go to insert. You add your text box, right? You draw it where you want it.

Right here, for example, and then it’s automatically [00:05:00] inside. So when you copy and paste you don’t have to do group You don’t have to get stressed. It’s just there. It’s there exactly where you need it It also doesn’t add the little border around so I feel like it saves like yet a little more time. It also is Transparent and clear where this one is accidentally covering up the chart in the gridlines.

So Maybe it’s like Three time savers. Not having to group, not having to remove the border, and not having to remove the white fill color. So to recap, click on your chart first, then add your text box. It’s going to be trapped inside. You don’t have to do any extra editing later on.

This year, one of my many New Year’s resolutions was to participate in The 100 Day Project, a creativity project that requires making one thing, every day for 100 days.

I’m a data visualization designer with a master’s degree in Information Visualization. And I love working with clay. I was a ceramics instructor at a summer camp for six years, and recently finished taking an advanced wheel throwing class. Molding things with my hands comes naturally to me.

I wanted to merge these two seemingly disparate passions of data visualization and ceramics in a playful way. Day-Doh-Viz was born: Data visualizations created out of Play-Doh produced “daily”. #DayDohViz

Play-Doh is a great medium because it’s brightly colored and photogenic. It’s easily moldable; you can pretty much do anything with it. It’s reusable and relatively inexpensive. And taking something from childhood and elevating it for a different use has a playful, nostalgic feel.

Working with Play-Doh also limits precision. It isn’t going to be perfect, but that’s part of the fun. It stops me from being a perfectionist and lets me focus on the bigger theme. It also allows me to visualize things I might not want to show with absolute precision, like my financial data.

My (45 so far!) play-doh visualizations have mostly fallen into 3 categories. Financial, personal data, and remakes of other data visualizations. Here are 6 of my favorite DayDohViz:

Income and Expenditures in April

Talking about money is such a taboo subject. Especially sharing your own financial information. Most of us aren’t great at personal finance, and it doesn’t help that we’re afraid to share this information with others. I like to help destigmatize this by sharing my own information. Play-doh feels like a low risk way to do this. It’s a little imprecise, and I don’t have to label the exact numbers, but the viewer gets the feel of what’s going on, and can maybe relate.

Perceptions of Probability in Play-Doh

What does it mean when something is “probable”? Is it more certain than “highly likely”? I love the original perceptions of probability joyplots, which plotted survey respondents numerical probability estimates for a variety of phrases. It quantifies how people perceive these usually squishy terms. It’s also colorful and fun. Doing a remake of it in Play-Doh was an enjoyable experience.

In doing so, I realized that joyplots are like the side view of violin plots. This Day-Doh-Vis won the most informative #CraftyDataViz Award.

Beverage Enjoyment

I love liquids. When you’re trying to create a whole new visualization every day, sometime you just need to graph something easy with “data” that you know. To me, the chart details make this one especially fun. All the carbonated beverages have a slight bubble texture to them. I added little suggestions of fruit to the drinks that typically come with a lemon, lime or cherry. The size of the sphere is the amount I want to drink and the proximity to the top is my enjoyment level. This was a quick viz to build probably about an hour.

Costs of New Dog Ownership

This one was another way of showing and talking about personal finance using my own experience and data. I knew there were going to be lots of start up costs to adopting a dog. I was surprised at how varied and spread out they were. The gif format helps the labeling not seem overwhelming, and allowed me to try my hand at something different. For just the bar graph, the extruding and assemble portion, took me about 40 minutes.

Birthdays Parties Change with Age

I’m at an age where on a Saturday I can attend a friend’s child’s party and an adult’s birthday. The contrast is quite interesting. When the little ones crash, they crash HARD. It was fun to build and make the numbers out of Play-Doh.

Birth Rate Viz in 3D

Inspired by the popular Scientific America visualization “Why Are so Many Babies Born around 8:00 A.M.” The original visualization has aspects of being 3D but is visualized in two dimensions. I played with that and built it on top of a glass jar. The original chart was so great, I didn’t want to mess with that, just bring out a different aspect that building it in real life could highlight. There was a lot of measuring over three days to create this one and I plastic wrapped it overnight.

Steps of Day-Doh-Viz-ing

1. Conceptualize. Have a brilliant idea of what I want to visualize.
2. Research. Figure out what data is available for what I want to show and how do I get it.
3. Data collection. Find and organize the data. Sometimes I’m tracking my own data over time. Or going through and collecting specific data about a topic.
4. Design. Figure out how I want to show it and either sketch or do some test graphs in google sheets.
5. Gather materials. I have a bin of play doh, but sometimes you need to find the right jar, or custom tape, or print out a graph to build on top of.
6. Color mix. Squish colors together to create colors that will match the visualization or work well being photographed. Warm colors tend to blow out when you don’t add a little black or white to them.
7. Build. Create the visual out of play-doh, sometimes this involves rolling balls, extruding bars, or forming mounds.
8. Lighting set-up. Sometimes window lighting works nicely, sometime I need to use a ring light.
9. Photograph. I always take different angles so it’s usually at least 20+ photos of each visual. Sometimes a video, sometimes a tripod so I can create a gif.
10. Image edit. I try to only stick to apps to keep it simple, so I’ve been using the iphone photo app and Facetune for some detail editing.
11. Annotate. Again, I’m trying to be simple, so I’m using This app to annotate my viz. It limits the amount of choices I have, like font and style.
12. Post. Share on social media and add to my portfolio of creations.

When you’re creating every data point by hand, you get to know your data intimately. As I’ve created more of these visualizations with play-doh, I’ve tried to find and highlight the unique things about this medium. I’m working to push the 3D aspect. And the ability to manipulate data and show different stages, or effects, by just adding elements or building everything and removing parts.

What I’ve Learned

• Most successful = unique form + unique data + well executed
• To remember that I’m doing this for fun
• Play-doh is cheap at TJ Maxx

The project has been highlighted in Andy Kirk’s Best of the Data Visualization for April list, and on Alli Torban’s Data Viz Today podcast. I’ve gotten a few hundred new Twitter followers, and asked to write a couple blog posts. Which is pretty successful for making things out of play-doh.

The best thing, I think, is that I’ve inspired other people to use play-doh for data visualization. Anna Fergusson took play-doh into her class and had her intro stats and data science students make visualizations. I’m not saying that play-doh is the best medium for data viz, but I think there’s something to be said for stepping away from traditional tools, and creating visualizations by hand.

And I think it can be less intimidating and to work with an imperfect medium, rather than pen and paper, or a computer which can feel demandingly precise.

Learn More about #DayDohViz

Follow along on Twitter for more #DayDohViz

Like most of us, they’re inundated with tons of data. My job was to make the data easier to “see” and understand. Rather than expecting them to read a 50+ page report prior to the meeting, we’re going to condense a few key facts into a single handout.

The anonymized data for this blog post:

• These aren’t the exact states.
• These aren’t the exact health indicators.
• These aren’t the exact numbers or percentages.

Pretend that health indicator 1 is something like fertility rate (births per woman). I realize the numbers are too high to represent actual fertility rates. It’s fake data. But you get the gist of what this dataset might show you.

Exploring with Spark Lines

I began exploring the data table with spark lines and spark columns.

Just highlight the row or column you want to visualize (e.g., C3 through M3), and find the icon that says Insert Sparklines.

Exploring with Conditional Formatting

Conditional formatting is the 8th World Wonder.

Rather than color-coding cells by hand, you just highlight a row or column (like B3 through M3), click the Conditional Formatting icon (typically in your Home tab), and start clicking on whatever you feel like. You don’t need to know what you’re doing. You won’t break anything.

In this example, I selected Color Scales. (Data Bars are also a personal favorite–I teach you how to make them here). After creating Color Scales, I adjusted the print settings so that the heat table could serve as a one-page meeting handout in itself. I’ve been using heat tables a lot recently, so I’ll post more examples in future posts.

One Chart, Oops

I tried highlighting the entire table and adding a single chart.

The computer instinctually knows this is a bad idea.

Excel gets confused because we’ve got too many different units: years, and numbers, and percentages, all together.

The messed-up graph looks like this:

Small Multiples

Since we can’t put everything onto one chart, we’ll need small multiples.

The formatted version would look like this. You might recognize the edits:

• Icons for each state (with the StateFace font; see a tutorial here)
• One color for each state (see color-coding blog posts here)

Download the File

These are Excel charts, pasted into PowerPoint for easier arrangement.

Then, I would Save As a PDF and share that PDF with the audience.

Want to explore the file on your own? You can download it here: https://depictdatastudio.ck.page/SmallMultiplesAreaCharts

Sometimes evaluators are hesitant to use Excel. One misconception is that Excel is only good for 3-D exploding pie charts, boring bar charts, and random radar charts. But Excel can do more than you think!
Innovation Network recently published State of Evaluation 2012: Evaluation Practice and Capacity in the Nonprofit Sector. Click here to download the report. I loved the visualizations in the report and wondered if I could re-create them in Excel.

Here’s a screenshot from page 7 of State of Evaluation 2012. The visualization shows the percentage of small, medium, and large nonprofit organizations that used quantitative and qualitative evaluation practices. Quantitative practices were more common than qualitative practices, and medium and large organizations were more likely to use these practices than smaller organizations.

And here’s what I made with a little Excel elbow grease:

The formatting’s not identical, but that’s not the point. Did you realize that you can manipulate Excel to produce almost anything you want?

I challenge you to re-create this State of Evaluation chart in Excel or R — no expensive software allowed. Email me your submission or tweet an image to @annkemery. I’ll post the solution on March 12, 2013.

What do you get for playing? A coffee or beer together, my treat, the next time you’re in DC; a workout for your brain; and bragging rights. Game on!