Spark Lines | Depict Data Studio

Designing a Prettier and More Effective Dashboard with Excel

Nov 9th, 2021 / Dashboards

Shawna Rohrman, Ph.D., is the Evaluation Manager for the Cuyahoga County Office of Early Childhood and its public-private partnership, Invest in Children. She enrolled in our Dashboard Design course and is sharing how she uses her new skills in real life. Thanks for sharing, Shawna!

Escaping the Bar Chart

Jun 8th, 2021 / Data Visualization

Bar charts aren’t evil. But they’re overused. I talked about Designs to Start Using Instead at the DataScienceGO conference in April 2021. We talked about my three favorite techniques for exploratory data visualization– spark lines, data bars and heat tables– and then I gave them some different options for maps. Are you ready to escape the bar chart?

How to Enter Cleaner Data AND Automate the Entire Analysis and Visualization Process

Feb 25th, 2020 / Data Analysis, Data Visualization

This is a brand new bonus module for current and past students in my data analysis course, Simple Spreadsheets: From Spreadsheet Stress to Superstardom with Microsoft Excel. In this post, you’ll learn how with a little upfront planning, you can automate the rest of the analysis and visualization process. Here’s how.

Revamping a Tired Data Table: A ‘Before’ and ‘After’ Reveal

May 15th, 2018 / Dashboards, Data Visualization

Guest blogger Mia Schmid shares how she revamped a tired data table into an easier to read and more engaging documents that communicates progress.

How to Explore Your Spreadsheets with Miniature At-a-Glance Graphs

May 1st, 2018 / Dashboards, Data Analysis, Data Visualization

I worked in several university research centers before transitioning to applied settings and learned data analysis and data visualization as two distinct phases. But nowadays I mix and mingle them a lot. My favorite exploratory visualization techniques are sparklines and data bars. I use these techniques daily, and I want to share them with you, too.

At-a-Glance Patterns with Area Charts

Aug 27th, 2014 / Data Visualization

A few weeks ago I showed you how to create small multiples bar charts simply by creating a stacked bar chart in Excel with invisible white segments. In 5 minutes or less! Today’s strategy to use area charts takes a few minutes longer, but the result is worth it.

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