Archives
How a Dashboard Changes the Conversation
Presenting data effectively changes the kinds of conversations that can happen inside organizations. Better presentations shape an improved culture of decision-making. Let me tell you about a recent example of this. Late 2012 I got a call from an evaluation officer who was working at the Walton Family Foundation. (Yep – *those* Waltons. Whatever your […]
Numbers, Guts, & Culture: How Data Visualization Changes the Conversation
Numbers have power, if you have the courage to use them powerfully. Take these two stories from opposite ends of the 20th Century. The first story is about a man in a steel mill. The second is about the crash of a giant. Charles Schwab had a mill manager whose people weren’t producing their quota of work. […]
My 2014 Personal Annual Report
Holy smokes it’s been a big year! I finished up my last workshop of 2014 last week and as I got into the cab to head to the airport, a wave of major sleepiness hit me hard. I’ve been super crazy productive and worked with some of the most amazing clients and become a pro […]
Customizing Colors in Excel
Few things scream “I didn’t try very hard” more than using the Excel default color schemes. Good news is that changing them up isn’t really very hard at all. First, decide what other colors you would like. Maybe pick something from your organizational brand. I used ColorBrewer to come up with the color scheme here. […]
Directly Labeling in Excel
It’s time to ditch the legend. You know – the legend, the key, the thing to the right of the graph that tells the reader what each piece of your graph means. We don’t need it. Legends are actually hard for many people to work with because they put a burden on the reader to […]
Visualizing Likert-type Data: Try Aggregated Stacked Bars
Man, do researchers love Likert-type data! You know what I mean – the kind of survey response options that range from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree (or vice versa, depending on your allegiances). Probably the most common way of visualizing that data is via a stacked bar chart, just like the one below created by […]
When It’s OK to NOT Start Your Axis at Zero
Don’t kick me out of the dataviz club for this. For a long time, folks have been adamant that the y axis has to start at zero. Otherwise, we are exaggerating the scale of the graph, distorting data, and lying like we work for Fox News. I’ve had my reservations about this but been comfortable […]
Evergreen Evolving
I took a deep breath and I did it. I changed my Twitter handle. This is a big deal. Things sure are evolving around here. It goes like this: I fell into the field of evaluation. Like most people on the planet (including my parents), I had no idea what evaluation was. My grad school […]
Death Penalty Graphics
What kind of imagery do you use when talking about the death penalty? I was out west a few months ago, working with Rakesh Mohan and his army of awesome. In the past, I had pressured them to use graphics in their reports and slides. And they did! Only the pictures they chose were government […]
