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

Evergreen Data Visualization Academy

The Data Visualization Academy is only open for enrollment twice a year. Come get select access to my best data visualization tutorials and advice. Four years ago today, I took the leap from salaried employee to independent consultant. Since then, I’ve worked with scores of organizations to help them use…

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Make It A Game

I spend a lot of time talking about really serious data with incredibly focused people. I love them and I love my job. But sometimes I need to balance that out with some Lucky Charms. So while eating my bowlful of magically delicious sugar bombs the other day and looking at…

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Exporting Graphs from Excel

I love when readers send me questions that I can turn into blog posts. The question: We often make our graphs in Excel and pop them in to reports or slides, but the transfer usually causes the formatting to get all wonky. How can we get print-quality graphics out of…

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Timelines, 4 Ways

The least helpful timelines I’ve ever seen are these: where time is basically bulleted, as if each of these intervals is equidistant and as if a bunch of text is the best way to communicate something inherently not based in narrative. You are basically saying, this journey is…

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What I Do: Before and After Business Slides

I help people design the best visual supports for streamlined conversations and decision-making. That’s just what New Client needed. He called to say “I need to look great at this meeting.” And by the time he got to that meeting, he looked great *and* he presented his qualitative and quantitative data…

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My New Favorite Graph Type: Overlapping Bars

Why have I fallen in love with this graph type? I think its because its such a great way to visualize the comparison between two things, when one is inherently a part of the other. In recent client projects, I’ve used these to show actual v. budgeted amounts. Or individual…

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Marketing Yourself as a Public Speaker

After years of making my way as a public speaker, 40 podcast episodes interviewing other public speakers, and a groundswell of people asking me how to grow their public speaking business, how about we chat for a few about what marketing strategies work and what don’t? What Works Before you…

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Book Club with Alberto, Andy, and Jorge

So far this year we’ve seen a ton of great books on data visualization published! What an awesome time! I got together with Alberto Cairo, Jorge Camoes, and Andy Kirk to talk about our books and the writing process in general. Not sure which of the latest…

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How Middle School Math Pays Off

Dear Mrs. George’s students, Awhile ago I met your teacher at a wedding reception. Her bestie married my father. As one does when engaging in small talk, she asked me what I do for a living. Me: I teach people how to present data. Ever seen a really terrible PowerPoint?…

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Guest Post: 6 Fab Formatting Tips for Surveys

Note from Stephanie: I asked Sheila to write this post because I still get tons of questions from readers about how to take the design I recommend for data visualization and apply it to survey design. I’m not a survey expert, but Sheila is! Hi! I’m Sheila B. Robinson, a…

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