Delightful, strategy-shifting, and totally free ideas for your next data viz

Make a Pictogram in Excel

This graph type goes by a lot of names: isotype chart, pictograph, or pictogram. Whichever way, it allows us to use symbols rather than stick with the squares that make up the waffle chart. And it is especially well suited to representing small counts of things that can otherwise be…

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First, Sketch.

Some might claim they look at a blank PowerPoint slide and see a source of hope and possibility, similar to how artists supposedly see inspiration in a blank canvas. I call bullshit on this. Artists did not just walk up to a blank canvas and envision their end product. They…

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Most Diagrams Suck

Diagrams are useful as a mental organizing activity for the people who make the diagram. If you want others to stand a chance, here’s what to do.

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Ever Heard of a Dendrogram?

When Jenny Lyons and I were pulling together the revised chapter on Qualitative Visualization in Effective Data Visualization, 2nd edition, we ended up ditching this section on dendrograms. In the list of most-likely-to-use qualitative visuals, this one is probably not in anyone’s top ten. But we still wanted to…

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Super Fast Small Multiple Graphs in Excel

Every time I show this trick to even veteran Excel ninjas, their heads explode. So you have probably heard me preach the gospel of small multiples once or twice before. Breaking a clutter-y graph into a lot of smaller graphs that show one piece of data at…

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Pre-Work Checklists

I have learned all of these lessons the hard way. I now have two checklists I run through before I have a workshop. One handles logistics and it’ll only be useful if you also run workshops. The other helps me determine whether a potential client and I are a good…

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2019 Call for Mentees

Did you see Vice? There’s a scene (this is no spoiler) in which a young Dick Cheney and Antonin Scalia share a sickening laugh as they agree to an interpretation of the Constitution that allowed a massive power grab for a president. It’s gross. It’s cringe-y. The most disturbing…

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I Failed

This is not news. Today. Yesterday. Every day. I fail all the time. Last week I was playing games that pay real money and failed to get anything out of them. This week, I have so many data visualization fails that I’m already planning a conference talk called The…

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My 2018 Personal Annual Report

This is my last personal annual report. I’ll tell you why. This year most of my metrics went down. At first, due to cultural conditioning that says “more is always better,” I was like Oh no! Before I go further, let’s pause and break that down. I’ve been creating…

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Building a Culture of Effective Data Visualization

The most frustrating part of attending one of my workshops is that you learn so many awesome ways of communicating data, you learn exactly what buttons to push to make it happen, you get hyped up on glee and data vizardry… and then the existing organizational culture stops you from…

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