Reviewing Datawrapper

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…

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Who Can Do Dataviz (or How a Field Evolves)

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…

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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…

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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…

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Bonus Post: Online Data Visualization and Reporting Classes

I’m taking my normal in-person speaking engagements online and you can come. I’ll be presenting one 90-minute class per month and repeating this entire series every 4 months. You’ll even get a sneak peek of examples from my forthcoming book (don’t tell Sage). Here is the lineup: Reporting to be…

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Assigning a Color System for Graphs

Let’s give the audience a peek behind our mental curtain. We want to make our logical organization of our data very very clear because what makes sense to us (who have been so steeped in the data we’re dreaming about it) will not be readily obvious to an outside viewer…

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Beer Delivery Visualization

Time to tackle some of the more important parts of life. I saw this delivery schedule in a cooler at a DC Whole Foods. Bell’s Beer is from Kalamazoo and we take pretty big pride in our hometown beer. So we (I mean, I) get really geeked when…

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How to Keep Parents in the Dark

Report card time in the Evergreen household! We have a kindergartener, so this is our first venture into decoding the marks representing his progress. Among other assessments, he’s given a standardized test throughout the year to measure his emergent literacy. Because it looks nothing like the rest of the report…

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Proper Placement of Chart Legends

In my dissertation study (probably the most boring four words to start any blog post), I saw a lot of evaluation reports that grouped all tables and graphs into the appendix. Tables, graphs, and other graphics really must be placed right next to the narrative describing them. Why? When we…

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What Exactly is Happening in this 3D Chart?

When giving advice about chart styles, one of my friends likes to say “save 3D for the movies.” She’s right – research shows that 3D charts actually slow reader comprehension. I’ve long advocated for the use of ChartTamer as a friendly way to restrict data visualization to that which will…

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