I recently saw a boring, black and white table as I was scrolling through LinkedIn.

The topic caught my attention—it was about Hispanic adults living with HIV—but the poorly-formatted table wasn’t making the patterns easy to understand.

I had a 30-minute window before I needed to pick up my kids from school, so I dove in!

In this 7-minute summary, you’ll learn:

1. bare-minimum edits for tables (alignment, decluttering, etc.);
2. a few different ideas for visualizing percent changes (checkboxes, slopes, deviation bars, icons); and
3. the winning design.

What’s Inside

• 0:00 Intro
• 0:18 The original table
• 1:06 Remaking the table with the same formatting
• 1:23 Gray horizontal lines
• 1:31 Left-aligned text
• 1:48 Trend lines
• 2:27 Percent changes with deviation bars
• 2:53 How-to tips in Excel (sparklines, data bars, IF statements)
• 3:28 Checkboxes to show increases or decreases
• 3:52 Adding state icons with the StateFace font
• 4:27 Adding arrow icons
• 4:54 Narrowing-down the best ideas
• 5:25 Re-sizing the columns
• 5:40  Not so Debbie-Downery

Download the Spreadsheet

It’s here.

The post Visualizing Percent Changes appeared first on Depict Data Studio.

In this video, you’ll see more than a dozen different charts that are possible inside Microsoft Excel.

What’s Inside

• 0:00 Intro
• 0:17 Dataviz On The Go
• 0:36 3 Levels of Excel Skills
• 1:05 Level 1: Overused Native Charts (Bars, Lines, Pies, etc.)
• 2:35 Level 2: Underused Native Charts (Combo, Tree, Sunburst, Maps, etc.)
• 4:01 Level 3: Non-Native Charts (Population Pyramids, Dumbbell Dots, Lollipops, etc.)
• 5:02 Disguises Needed for Non-Native Charts
• 5:54 Interactive Dashboards in Excel (Excel Tables, Pivot Tables, Pivot Charts, and Slicers)
• 6:16 Static Dashboards in Excel (Made in Excel, but Saved/Shared as PDFs)
• 6:41 Your Turn
• 6:55 A Personal Note

3 Levels of Excel Vizardry

I’ve taught data visualization in Excel a dozen different ways over the years.

Nowadays, I teach Excel dataviz based on the degree of behind-the-scenes hacking needed to produce that chart.

We start easy. Then, we work up to harder battles.

Here are the three Levels of Excel Vizardry:

• Level 1: Overused Native Charts
• Level 2: Underused Native Charts
• Level 3: Non-Native

Let’s go through some of the Excel secrets in more detail.

Level 1: Overused Native Charts

These are the familiar faces:

• Pies
• Donuts
• Bars and columns
• Clustered bars and clustered columns
• Stacked bars and stacked columns
• Line graphs

What are Native Charts?

“Native” charts mean they’re available from our menu with just a few clicks:

What’s Wrong with Overused Charts?

There’s nothing wrong with a bar chart here or there… but any chart gets boring when we show it over and over and over and over and over and over.

There’s also the issue of analytical depth — or lack of depth.. If we’re only using bar charts… then we’re only showing totals and averages. There are dozens more statistical approaches!

Beware! Formatting Needed

Stacked bar charts, for example.

They’re easy to make.

But we still have to:

• enlarge the font;
• darken the font (to pass official Accessibility rules for color contrast);
• directly label the data (so viewers aren’t relying on the colored legend alone — another Accessibility rule);
• outline the touching shapes in white (which helps with colorblindness and grayscale printing);
• show fewer increments in the scale (so it’s not so busy);
• decide whether to apply a dark-light contrast — or not (learn about data storytelling here); and
• adjust the gap width (if you want) to nudge the bars closer together.

Level 2: Underused Native Charts

This is where it starts getting fun!!

Excel can make:

• Combo charts (e.g., a column chart with a target line, as shown below)
• Overlapping Bars
• Area charts (where you shade the area underneath the line for better oomph and high color contrast)
• Slopes (a line chart with exactly 2 points in time, like pre and post)
• Small Multiples Lines (to combat the spaghetti line graph)
• Bumps (for rankings)
• Scatter plots (x and y)
• Bubble charts (x, y, and z)
• Tree maps (for nested categories)
• Heat Maps
• Sunbursts (nesting)
• Box and Whisker (to go beyond averages and show the min, quartile 1, median, quartile 3, and max)
• Waterfall (how pieces add to a net number)
• Radar (to compare several ordinal categories at once)
• Icons & Symbols (to make our graphs easier to navigate — and more memorable!)

Yes, These are Native Charts

Well… if you’re using the latest version of Excel.

If you’re on outdated software, (most of) these charts are still possible. They just get harder to make, i.e., they’re in Level 4 territory.

Yes, Underused Native Charts Add Variety (and Analytical Depth)

We’re not just adding variety for variety’s sake.

(Although common sense — and hundreds of consulting projects — has shown me that dataviz novelty is one of the best ways to increase engagement.)

Most importantly, we’re adding analytical depth. For example, a regular ol’ bar chart just compares the average or total of several categories. What if we compare them by location, too? Now we’ve got a heat map! We can spot geographical patterns, which would’ve been impossible in a bar chart.

Beware! Formatting Needed

Scatter plots are easy to make.

But we still have to:

• enlarge the font;
• darken the font (to pass official Accessibility rules for color contrast);
• add a key (that each dot represents one student);
• label the scales (with everyday language, like More skills gains, because scatter plots are notoriously difficult to read for people who don’t stare at graphs all the time); and
• decide whether to add a dark-light contrast.

Level 3: Non-Native Charts

Are you already using a variety of charts? Have you actually analyzed your data (beyond averages, and beyond totals)? Can you adjust the gap width, annotate the data, and apply colors strategically in your sleep?

Then you’re ready for Level 3!

With behind-the-scenes elbow grease, you can make:

• Stream Graphs
• Waffles
• B’Arcs
• Small Multiples Bars
• Population Pyramids
• Diverging Stacked Bars
• Lollipops
• Dots
• Swarm Plots
• Tile Grid Maps
• Sankey Diagrams

What are Non-Native Charts?

You won’t find any buttons that automatically make these charts.

Instead, we have to insert one chart type… and disguise it as something else.

For example, we have to insert a stacked bar chart… and disguise it as a waffle chart. You’ll need a Magic Table behind the scenes, too.

A stacked bar chart gets disguised as a population pyramid. Yes, you’ll need a Magic Table with placeholder values.

A scatter plot gets disguised as a dot plot, and so on. Each value gets assigned a x-y placeholder location inside the Magic Table.

Do these maneuvers turn your brain inside out and upside down? You’re not alone.

Learn More

If you’re consistently making, editing, and applying graphs from Level 3, you’re already a vizard. Get in touch so I can send work your way!

If you’re in Level 1 or 2, you’ll love Data Storytelling in Excel. You’ll go slow and steady so you don’t feel overwhelmed. You’ll dip your toe in… and then you’ll be swimming in the deep end in no time.

The post Which Graphs Can I Make in Excel? appeared first on Depict Data Studio.

Here’s how you can repeat a few rows at the top of each page.

What’s Inside

0:00 Welcome to Dataviz On The Go

0:08 The Visual Appendices

0:22 The PDF/Print Issue, Oops!

0:42 The Best Solution

1:42 3… 2… 1…

Transcript

[00:00:00] I’m Ann Emery. You’re watching Dataviz On The Go, the series where I make quick tutorials for you as I’m racing around between my workshops. I was giving a dataviz workshop recently and we were making these visual appendices for the back of a report. And they look nice in Excel. They’ve got some light visuals here, like the bars to help us find key patterns.

And then you go to print and you’re like, this almost looks right. You know, this, this would be like PDFed or printed or something. Imagine this as the appendix of your report. It looks nice on the first page. You can tell what’s what, the column headers are there, but then on the second page, it’s like, Oh, what’s even going on?

What’s what? Okay. How do you repeat the column headers when your table breaks across multiple pages? There are a couple of ways to do this. I’m going to show you the way that I think is the fastest. I don’t want to waste your time with any like, so, so mediocre solutions. I think the best way is you go to.

Page layout. You go to print titles [00:01:00] and look at this rows to repeat at the top when it’s printed or pdf. You click on the little arrow which minimizes your window and then you go select the row that you want to repeat. Not the whole thing. Because that would be redundant. That would be unnecessary. It’s probably just this juicy row, row six.

And then you go back to your little arrow. It expands the window. You can say, okay, I’m going to click print preview here while we’re in here, just to show you what it would look like. Look, column headers there as usual, right where you expected. And they’re also on the second page. Isn’t that nice? You just repeat a couple of rows at the top of your page.

Three, two, one. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and share. Not sponsored. What did you say?

The post How to Keep Headings in View When You Print or PDF (So Your Excel Table is Easier to Read) appeared first on Depict Data Studio.

In this video, let’s make a starter dashboard in Microsoft Excel.

You’ll learn how to make four quick visuals:

1. Sparklines
2. Data bars
3. Symbol fonts
4. Color scales

I use these visuals over and over in my real-life consulting projects.

Watch the Tutorial

Sparklines

Sparklines are helpful for visualizing patterns over time, like daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual data.

To create sparklines:

1. Highlight the first row of your table.
2. Go to the Insert tab.
3. Go to the Sparklines section.
4. Click on the first one (a Line sparkline).
5. Choose where we want to put the sparklines (off to the right of the table).
6. Click insert and enjoy the sparklines!

We can also edit our sparklines!

We might adjust the data source, type (from line to column), or color. I typically gray everything out and highlight a high point or low point in a dark brand color.

We can also group and ungroup our sparklines (e.g., if we want each category in our dashboard to have its own color).

And if we change our mind, we can clear them out.

Data Bars

Data Bars give us horizontal bars (as opposed to sparklines’ vertical columns).

They’re helpful for visualizing summary statistics like totals or averages.

To create data bars:

1. Highlight the cells you want to visualize (e.g., the total column).
2. Go to the Home tab.
3. Click on the Conditional Formatting button.
4. Select solid-filled data bars.

Symbol Fonts

I use checkboxes to visualize whether I met a goal or target.

We can get quick checkboxes through symbol fonts!

In the video, you’ll see me write an =if() statement to transform g’s and c’s into Webdings checkboxes.

Audiences love the checkboxes. They’re intuitive, colorblind-friendly, and grayscale printing-friendly.

Color Scales

a.k.a. heat maps or heat tables.

I love color scales for visualizing the interior of my table—when I want to compare lots of rows and columns to each other.

To create color scales:

1. Highlight the cells you want to visualize (i.e., the interior of the table).
2. Go to the Home tab.
3. Click on the Conditional Formatting button.
4. Select Color Scales. Most of the time, we’ll use a Green-White Color Scale. That’ll make the big numbers dark (and the small numbers will be light).

Combos

In real life, we might combine several of these techniques.

We might add color scales to the interior of the table…

We might compare the totals with data bars…

We might add Webdings checkboxes to see whether we met a goal…

And we might add more data bars to see how far we were over or under our goal.

Formatting

In real life, we’d edit these quick visuals.

I suggest:

• Using brand colors and brand fonts.
• Outlining the color scales in white (so the cells can be differentiated against each other).
• Placing the data bars in a separate column than their numeric labels.
• Coloring the checkboxes (rather than boring black).
• Adjusting the colors in the over/under bars (to avoid scary red).
• Moving the labels to the over/under bars to their own column (via an =if() statement to save time).

Download this Spreadsheet

Try it yourself!

Download this spreadsheet.

Explore the completed version with the =if() statements.

Use the empty version to practice alongside me as you replay the video.

Get in Touch

If you get stuck, reach out o­n LinkedIn.

The post How to Make a Not-So-Scary Starter Dashboard in Excel appeared first on Depict Data Studio.

—

When COVID-19 pushed many events online, I decided to host a virtual Christmas trivia event for my family.

Participants answered questions over four different rounds in teams of three to six people. The rounds each had five questions and all questions were Christmas- or New Year-themed.

Before: Compiling the Data in a Spreadsheet

To support scorekeeping, teams had an individual score sheet where they wrote and marked their own answers.

I had a master score sheet that would automatically pull their scores together so all teams scores were combined into one page.

I’d then show this master score sheet via screen share at half-time and at the end of the event.

The master score sheet looked like this:

While it brought all the scores into one place, it wasn’t very easy for my participants to quickly pull out the key information (i.e., how well their team was doing).

I decided to apply some of the lessons I learned in the Dashboard Design course to make the sheet more accessible.

After: My Trivia Night Dashboard

First, I had to decide what type of dashboard I wanted to make.

In the course, Ann provided a handy Dashboard Cheat Sheet that helped me see different options.

I decided because I had one time point and wanted to compare categories (i.e., teams) that bars would likely be best.

I also decided to convert the numerical scores into percentages because not all rounds had the same number of possible points. Percentages would be a more consistent indicator.

Now it was time to make the dashboard.

It was easy to follow along step by step with Ann’s stacked bar dashboard video tutorial.

I made the following dashboard using the Data Bars feature in Microsoft Excel:

What I Learned about Dashboards and Excel

Not only were the steps easy to follow, but I also learned about better dashboard and Excel practices.

These tips help make your life easier and your dashboards more editable and readable.

Some of my lessons learned include:

• Always put a title, subtitle, and date on the dashboards.
• If your text is in a colour, make it bold so it is easier to read.
• Add a white border around cells to add white space.
• Use cell styles and Theme Colours to make formatting more consistent and easier to edit (I somehow did not know about this in Excel even though I use it regularly in Word).
• Give yourself a bit of time to do the final editing to make it sure fits on a page

With this dashboard, I found it much easier to see:

• How well teams did in each round (e.g., team 6 struggled with Round 4, but excelled in Round 3).
• How teams compared to each other.
• How hard each round was (e.g., Round 2 was on average harder than Round 3).

Designing a Second Dashboard

Encouraged by my dashboard attempts, I decided to try one more dashboard.

I wanted to know within each round, which questions did teams get right and wrong.

This would help me identify which questions were too easy and which were too hard. It’s a fine balance to get when hosting trivia!

I thought about including it in the same dashboard above, but I then I watched one of Ann’s videos about the four types of dashboards.

This reminded me that it’s okay (and even better) to make different dashboards for different audiences.

I had to do a bit of data cleaning first. I ended up with a table that showed for each question in each round the percent of teams that got that question fully correct:

While it had the information that I needed, I found it hard to identify any patterns or the take home message.

I remembered that in the Dashboard Design course Ann had a video on how to compare categories using heatmaps. (Here’s a blog post tutorial you can read.)

I used the steps to create this:

What I Learned from My Second Dashboard

As with the first dashboard, there were some great tricks.

Essentially, if you’re doing something manually (like changing the text colour to white on the darker cells or individually colouring cells) there is almost always a better way! You can use Excel’s conditional formatting to automatically color-code background fills and/or font colors.

I found it much easier to identify patterns both within round and across rounds.

For example, teams generally had a harder time with questions in Round 2 than they did with Round 3 (there are more lighter cells).

Using this dashboard, I could easily pick out questions which were too hard and too easy.

Questions That Were Too Hard

Round 1 – Question 4: What is the name of this dish and where is it eaten on January 6? (Answer: Rosca de Reyes; Mexico)

Round 2 – Question 2: What is the highest grossing Christmas movie (according to Wikipedia)?

Options: a. The Grinch b. Krampus c. The Polar Express d. Elf

(Answer: The Grinch)

Questions That Were Too Easy

Round 4 – Question 2: What fruit is a traditional stocking stuffer?

(Answer: Citrus fruit like an orange, mandarin, clementine)

Round 3 – Question 4: What performance is this song played in? (Bonus: Who is the composer?)

(Answer: The Nutcracker; Tchaikovsky)

(Sound clip source: Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License, via Wikimedia Commons)

I really enjoyed how approachable and practical the videos in this course were.

I can’t wait to continue to apply the tips and techniques I learned both at work and for fun!

Maybe at next year’s trivia I’ll have to test some of the dashboard designs for comparing change over time.

Connect with Emily

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilysross/

The post Using Dashboards to Make a Family Trivia Event Even Better appeared first on Depict Data Studio.

Ready to escape the bar chart? I talked about Designs to Start Using Instead at the DataScienceGO conference in April 2021.

Watch the Conference Session

Choose Your Own Adventure

This was a Choose Your Own Adventure presentation, where I gave the conference attendees a chance to vote for the chart families they wanted to learn about.

These non-linear presentations aren’t for everyone. You need to be extremely comfortable with the topic area and with presenting. You can learn more about Choose Your Own Adventure presentations here.

Exploratory Data Visualization

First, we talked about my three favorite techniques for exploratory data visualization:

1. Spark lines
2. Data Bars
3. Heat Tables

Spark Lines

Want to add miniature trend lines to your spreadsheet? Here’s how:

• Highlight the top row of your dataset (the numbers that you want to visualize).
• Go to the Insert tab.
• Click on the Sparklines button.
• Follow the instructions: Choose where you want the sparklines to be placed. I usually position them off to the right side of my dataset.

Data Bars

Want to explore your dataset with miniature horizontal bars? Here’s how:

• Highlight the data you want to visualize.
• Stay on the Home tab.
• Click on the Conditional Formatting button.
• Choose a solid-filled Data Bar.

Heat Tables

We can also explore our dataset with instant color-coding. Here’s how to add a heat map or heat table to your spreadsheet:

• Highlight the data you want to visualize.
• Stay on the Home tab.
• Click on the Conditional Formatting button.
• Choose a Color Scale.

PLEASE avoid the inaccessible options—anything with red and green. Most of the Conditional Formatting options are absolute garbage, to be honest. Here’s a blog post that lists which Conditional Formatting options to avoid altogether—and what to use instead.

Want more info? In the video, you’ll see me open Excel and provide how-to tutorials.

Maps

Next, we discussed a few options for maps.

Choropleth Maps

You’ve seen this one: The regular ol’ color-coded map, or choropleth. Big numbers are dark. These maps are familiar and intuitive.

But, there’s a problem with regular maps: The large places can dwarf the small places. No matter how dark we color-in tiny Delaware, for example, the larger places like Texas and Alaska will always steal the show.

Cartographers have a name for this misleading issue with regular maps. It’s called The Alaska Effect.

Tile Grid Maps

Don’t worry, we’re not doomed by The Alaska Effect! There are a couple alternatives worth mentioning.

Square tile grid maps can help us overcome The Alaska Effect. Every location is the same shape and size, so now our audience only has to look at color. In other words, since Delaware and Texas are the same shape and size, we’re free to focus entirely on color.

BUT.

There’s a learning curve with tile grid maps. They’re almost too novel. Sometimes we spend more time focusing on why our home state isn’t in the right spot than on actually finding patterns in the data.

Tile grid maps have become more and more common over the years. In the video, I show you some real-life examples from the Urban Institute, the Washington Post, Child Trends, CNN, and National Geographic.

Hex Maps

Rather than using squares…. What if we try hexagons?

With six edges, hex maps give us more flexibility in arranging the shapes. That way, the maps can look closer to real-life maps.

In the video, I discuss some additional advantage of hex maps:

• Hex maps combat the Alaska Effect.
• Hex maps include more of the correct neighboring states compared to square maps.
• Hex maps include the correct southern tips.
• Hex maps include more notches for the Great Lakes.
• Hex maps visualize the correct four corners of the U.S.

And of course, hex maps aren’t just for the United States. You can create maps for zip codes, Census tracts, states, provinces, countries, etc. In the video, I show you a waffle map of African countries.

The post Escaping the Bar Chart appeared first on Depict Data Studio.