Wow, the action in the dataviz/tech world this past week has been awesome! A female programmer at a Python (that’s a programming language also used for dataviz) conference was fired after tweeting about the sexist jokes she was hearing from a largely white young male crowd, and Tableau’s…
Successful Webinar Presenting
I host or give roughly 70 webinars a year, most over with AEAÂ and others right here at Evergreen Data. Here’s what I have seen that makes for a good webinar presentation experience (as opposed to presenting the same content in person). Use a faster pace.
Top Four Mistakes Seen in Conference Presentations
With my book manuscript and an edited volume of New Directions in Evaluation (on dataviz) due this Friday, this week’s blog post is a repost from an original article I wrote for Presentation Magazine. My background is a garbled mouthful: interdisciplinary program evaluation. What does that even mean? It…
Presenting Graphs with the Slow Reveal
Over here I talked about how important it is that we gradually introduce components of complex graphics – one-at-a-time – so as not to overwhelm the visual field and working memory of our audience members. We don’t want to slam our content in their faces all at…
Scratch-Off Graphs
A couple of weeks ago, I got an email asking me for ideas about ways to make evaluation findings more exciting and interesting. I know, some of you are thinking, “aren’t they always exciting and interesting???” but alas it isn’t the case. This idea wasn’t appropriate for the emailer’s particular…
Slide Redesign: Rodney Hopson’s Keynote
I had the joy of working with Rodney Hopson, 2012 President of the American Evaluation Association, on the slides for his keynote talk. The transformation was so huge that I asked Rodney if I could write a blog post about it and the thinking we put into the new design.
My 2012 Personal Annual Report
Yeah – It’s that time of year again! Here’s what I’ve been up to. Imagine if we could convince more clients to let us produce evaluation report summaries in this dashboard-esque format. Side note: I deviated from my normal routine and made this report…
Before & After Slides: Stay on the Side of Simplicity
My friend, Kurt Wilson, and I just wrapped up a contract to revise a set of slides – and the graphs within – for a big international client I can’t name. Here I’ll walk through one of the original slides and our revision of it. Keep in mind that these…
Making Back-to-Back Graphs in Excel
Let’s say we’re interested in comparing how two groups – oh, teachers and principals – responded to a survey. One way to visually display that comparison would be a bar graph, where each question had two bars, one for teachers and one for principals. It’s helpful in some ways, but…
How I Feel About Slide Animations
Most people fall into one of two camps on this issue: There are the newbies, who use animation with abandon to kartwheel text onto a slide. And then there are the veterans, who are so sick of kartwheeling they’ve rejected any slide animation on any computer anywhere in the…