This is a short listen (15 min) with some techniques that are hopefully super obvious if you've been following my work for a while ..read more

I’m a big fan of takeaway text: for reports, for presentations, and even for interactive dashboards. Sometimes people think that takeaway text isn’t possible for dynamic dashboards in Excel. They worry that they’ll have to write each sentence by hand. False! In this video, you’ll learn about two ingredients: Concatenation: You’ll use the ampersand (&) to join the content from a few cells together. Helper Cells: There are pivot tables, helper tables (with lookups), and more concatenation to write out the graph labels. You can write takeaway sentences about: The most or least (the poles ..read more

Are you printing or PDFing that Excel table? If it’s a long table, and spills onto a second page, then you’ll need to keep the table headings in view. Here’s how you can repeat a few rows at the top of each page. What’s Inside 0:00 Welcome to Dataviz On The Go 0:08 The Visual Appendices 0:22 The PDF/Print Issue, Oops! 0:42 The Best Solution 1:42 3… 2… 1 ..read more

Dotted lines have a specific purpose in dataviz: for projections or estimations. Not just because. Stick around for the how-to lesson in Microsoft Excel. You’ll learn how to select a single dot (or “marker”) along the line, which controls the preceding line segment. Then, you can turn just one section of the graph into a dotted line. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=titF7TQcwDc What’s Inside 0:00 Don’t Use Dotted Lines “Just Because” 0:20 Dotted Lines are for Projections or Estimations 1:24 How to Make Dotted Lines on Excel Graphs 3:44 Questions ..read more

Brand colors are great. Color-coding by category is greater. But avoid using those brand colors as body font within paragraphs. Colored font is okay for headers, but not for the body. What’s Inside 0:00 Intro 0:31 Before: Example from a Public Workshop 1:33 After: Dark Dark Dark Gray Body Font 2:21 The Before-After Difference ..read more

Did you miss my Good Tech Fest conference session? Catch the replay here! Materials Follow along with the spreadsheet: https://depictdatastudio.gumroad.com/… You’ll have to watch the video to get the coupon code. There are codes available for the first 500 people. What’s Inside 0:00 Intro 1:14 The 4 Steps 4:28 (1) Excel Table 12:36 (2) Pivot Tables 18:14 (3) Pivot Charts 20:47 (4) Slicer(s) 24:33 A Gift for You 25:55 Q&A ..read more

You’ve got two options. (Well, if you like to split hairs, there are more options than that. But what if you’re busy and don’t have time to lose? Here are the main copying/pasting options worth paying attention to.) Option 1: Excel Object a.k.a. Ann K. Emery’s preferred approach Instructions In Excel, create your graph. In Excel, format your graph. (Declutter; apply brand colors and dark-light contrast; delete the built-in title; re-size the font and graph; etc.) In Excel, make sure your Theme Colors and Theme Fonts are selected. In Word or PowerPoint, make sure your Theme Colors and Theme F ..read more

A few months ago, one of my favorite students brought this graph to Office Hours: (These aren’t the exact numbers, age ranges, or years. But you get the idea.) She already knew how to make population pyramids in Excel. Population pyramids require Level 4 vizardy skills. Woohoo! But she wanted to take the population pyramid a step further, and she wanted to show how the population might change over time, especially for older adults. So, she followed this online tutorial to add those curvy lines. (Yep, it’s made with a combo chart in Excel.) Bare-Minimum Edits As usual, we tackled the bare-min ..read more

Wondering what I’ve got planned this year?  Here’s what’s in store for 2024 related to:  Online Courses,  Private Training,  Conference Keynotes, and  My Personal and Professional Goals.  Online Courses  The biggest improvement for 2024 is that all 6 courses will be offered LIVE (!!!). We’ll meet over Zoom on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday afternoon from 1 – 4:30 pm Eastern each day. We’ll have 10 minute breaks every hour, and the last 30 minutes is reserved for extra Q&A time. Classes are highly interactive. I’l ..read more

Just because I’m pro-graph, I’m not anti-table. Technical tables have so much value, especially as visual appendices for reports. In this blog post, you’ll get ideas for bringing your technical tables to life. Before Here’s what the “before” version of some technical tables looked like. These are made-up numbers, but you get the idea. The public health staff wanted to look at quarterly numbers, the total annual number, and the rate (the number of cases per 100,000 live births). Even if you’re not measuring neonatal abstinence syndrome, I bet there are numbers that you track each quarter. You ..read more