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

Sometimes our graphs have a single, overarching takeaway message. Maybe the numbers simply went up over time. Or down. Other times, it’s more complicated. Here’s how to explain multiple takeaway messages in presentations: with multiple slides, one per takeaway message. Before: Everything Smushed on One Slide Here’s what I typically see: lots of possible takeaway messages shoved into a single graph on a single slide. The presenter says something like this: “Next, let’s talk about gonorrhea diagnoses in our state. We’re looking at the number of diagnoses per 100,000 people. We’re also looking ..read more

Do you need to share statistics in presentations? Maybe you’re getting ready for a talk at a conference. Or, maybe you’re sharing updates with coworkers in a staff meeting. In this blog post, you’ll learn how to explain dense graphs one slide at a time, which makes it easier for our audience to follow along. Before Last summer, I was keynoting the National Birth Defects Prevention Network’s annual conference in Atlanta. Here’s what one of the health department’s original graphs looked like. We wanted to make a presentation-ready version. If you work in public health, then you know that the t ..read more

I was recently working with an online course student to visualize data for her country’s government officials. These aren’t her real categories or real numbers, but you get the idea. Before: Reading Numbers Her “before” version looked something like this: She had small n’s — a unique situation! My definition of a “small” number is less than 100 — an arbitrary cut-off point that I learned from a past supervisor, and I’ve stuck with for years. Not only was the total under 100, but each of the cells was under 100, too. After: Skimming Visuals There are several ways to bring the table to life ..read more

Something wonderful — and terrible — has started happening. Researchers, evaluators, and scientists complete my online courses. Or they bring me in for private workshops. And they start applying what they learned. GREAT!!! But it’s a little off. OOPS. This is entirely my fault. I’ve been recommending that we use icons for years now — but I haven’t been clear enough about how to use them, and how not to use them. In this blog post, you’ll see 8 different types of icon use. The good, bad, and ugly. (1) Multi-Color 1990s-Era Clip-Art: NOOOOOOOO Let’s start with what not to do: clip-art. Icons a ..read more

I’m an epidemiologist and public health researcher who studies health policies on infectious disease. I got the opportunity to work with a public health agency which I was really exited about. Until I had to present my research to a group of policy makers… Before: The Dusty Shelf Report Condensing two full chapters—73 pages of my thesis—into a short report for the policy making group seemed like an impossible task. That’s when Report Redesign came to the rescue! As this research was being conducted in an academic setting, I couldn’t entirely do away with all the technical details (or what Ann ..read more

Want to make an interactive dashboard in Microsoft Excel? Interactive (a.k.a. dynamic) dashboards are a great option for technical audiences that have the time and interest to explore the data for themselves. They’ll look something like this: Interactive dashboards are easy to create — sort of. It depends on your existing skill level. You’ll need four pieces: A Clean, Contiguous Dataset (maybe stored as an Excel Table) Pivot Tables Pivot Charts Slicers Are you already using these four features regularly? Great! Linking them together in a dashboard will be easy for you. Are you new to Excel ..read more

Dashboards aren’t supposed to take forever. They’re not supposed to cost an arm and a leg. They don’t even need to be outsourced to a consultant. Dashboards are supposed to be fast and easy. We make ’em quickly. We give the numbers to leaders. They make data-driven decisions. That’s it! Stop overthinking it. In this article, you’ll see examples of real dashboards that you can use as inspiration for your own workplace. No need to start from scratch. Adapt one of these dashboards instead. Grant Deliverables In this blog post, you’ll see how Josephine Engels did need to start from scratch — she ..read more