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.

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.

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.

What’s Inside

• 0:00 The 2-pager about NIH grant terminations
• 2:20 Lookup table with Stateface icons
• 2:38 Original table from the policy brief
• 2:47 The dataset
• 2:58 Idea 1: A better table that’s Accessible and accessible
• 3:22 Idea 2: A static graph or map
• 3:40 Idea 3: An interactive visualization
• 3:55 Idea 4: A 2-page infographic
• 4:06 The call-out boxes with icons at the top
• 4:12 The finished map
• 4:30 The finished table
• 4:42 Color-coding by category
• 4:51 Big-picture first, then more detailed, then more detailed
• 5:15 The finished product again
• 5:29 More ideas for the original policy brief
• 6:04 Let’s connect

Download the Spreadsheet

It’s here.

The topic caught my attention, but I was worried that the internet weirdos would ignore it because the axis doesn’t start at zero.

People will create all sorts of excuses to ignore data and facts.

I also wanted to try a column chart.

And someone else commented on LinkedIn that the number of honorable mentions – which increased this year – could be helpful to see.

In all my “spare” time on a Friday afternoon, I re-made it:

The dot dot dot title for small multiples graphs… swoon. <3

I love using takeaway titles that extend across the page (to help readers see how the graphs are connected).

Behind the Scenes

More info about my thought process, and some Excel and PowerPoint how-to’s.

What’s Inside

• 0:00 Welcome
• 0:20 The original line chart
• 1:38 The edited column chart
• 2:18 What about honorable mentions?
• 3:00 Ann’s drafts
• 4:30 Finished product – the small multiples column chart
• 6:23 Behind the scenes in PowerPoint
• 6:40 Questions? Comments?

Download the Excel File

It’s here: https://depictdatastudio.kit.com/remaking-nsf-graph