Last week my friend Ann Emery posted a dataviz challenge on something I’d been wanting to figure out for a long time: how to make a diverging stacked bar chart in Excel (I’d also heard of them as sliding bar charts, but getting our dataviz terminology on the same…
Examples of great evaluation reports and executive summaries ranks as one of the top questions I get by email. What’s a good exec sum look like? How long should it be? How do I incorporate graphics into a report without looking like a marketing firm? Read on, friends. I’ve pulled…
A son of friends, we’ll call him Avery, was tasked with every 4th grader’s nightmare – prepare and deliver a presentation on one of the US states. When I was in 4th grade, we didn’t have PowerPoint or wikipedia. I think I made a poster that includes pictures clipped from…
We don’t just report the facts, ma’am. We use a set of values to make judgments about the data, like which of these results is good or needs improvement, etc. We set benchmarks and cut points so our clients can understand when action needs to be taken and where. Yet…
When it comes to qualitative data, we have far fewer dataviz tools at our disposal. Another time, promise, we’ll get into word clouds and what Stuart Henderson thinks of them. Today, let’s tackle a more common method of displaying qualitative data – quotes. In reports, quotes are usually shown…
Conference season has begun (does it ever really end?) and I’m thinking again about the swag. You know, those freebies given away by vendors or fellow evaluators. I am personally not usually excited about the heaps of easily breakable plastic crap, but if done well evaluation swag can make a…
Here’s what happens to audience brains when presenters speak while showing text-heavy slides. Their working memory gets overloaded. Working memory is that part of the cognition system where we contemplate information, wrangle with it, try to digest it. But working memory has limits on its cognitive load. It can only…
A while ago I was at a Naomi Robbins’ workshop and she was pretty emphatic that dot plots are the better method of visualization, as compared to bar charts. The reason goes back to Cleveland’s early experiments on visual perception, which found that humans most accurately interpret locations on line,…
Oh yeah – it’s my first ever guest post! I’m so happy to host Elissa – she does fantastic work. -Stephanie My name is Elissa Schloesser with Visual Voice, I’m a freelance graphic designer specializing in communicating complex information and ideas. I work specifically with mission-based organization, and partner…
Have you tried out Datawrapper? The Guardian uses it for their data visualization reporting (learned after reading through lengthy but amusing comments and semi-argument on Few’s blog) so I figured it was worth checking out. Datawrapper is primarily used to embed graphics in a website, like…
