Ann's Blog: Introducing the Data Visualization Checklist
Originally posted at Ann's Blog This post has been a long time coming. Stephanie Evergreen and I knew some time ago that evaluators and social scientists had a thirst for better graphs, a clear...
View ArticleAnn's Blog: Avoiding diagonal text in your charts, and other shameful...
Originally posted at Ann's Blog I’ve been building portfolios of my work for a while. Over the past year or so I’ve been building an online portfolio of speaking and writing engagements. Before that, I...
View ArticleEvergreen Data: How to Rock the Text in your Data Visualization
Originally posted at Evergreen Data Very recently, Ann Emery and I released the Data Visualization Checklist. It’s thorough and its going to help your data visualization kick some serious ass. In these...
View ArticleEvergreen Data: Labels are Used Sparingly
Originally posted at Evergreen Data This post is about how to avoid inducing claustrophobia in your data visualizations. Too much text on a graph clutters it up, making readers feel suffocated. So...
View ArticleAnn's Blog: Please: Don’t use default colors in your chart
Originally posted at Ann's Blog I’ve got a lot of dataviz skeletons in my closet. This beauty comes from my second week as an evaluator: Border, grid lines, tick marks…. A legend instead of direct...
View ArticleEvergreen Data: How to Make Dumbbell Dot Plots in Excel
Originally posted at Evergreen Data In case it wasn’t clear, I freakin love dot plots. They are amazingly easy to read, beautifully simple in their display. I was making these babies for some clients a...
View ArticleEvergreen Data: Adding a Benchmark Line to a Graph
Originally posted at Evergreen Data This simple line packs so much power. Adding a benchmark line to a graph gives loads of context for the viewer. Here’s how to make one right inside Excel. It’s so...
View ArticleEvergreen Data: Guest Post – Charting Confidence Intervals
Originally posted at Evergreen Data Hi there! I’m Angie Ficek and I’m a program evaluator at a small evaluation consulting firm called Professional Data Analysts, Inc. (PDA) in Minneapolis, MN. In a...
View ArticleAnn's Blog: This is What Equidistant Axis Labels Look Like
Originally posted at Ann's Blog Let’s pretend you’re tracking whether friendly reminder messages bring in more responses to your survey. Can you spot the fatal flaw? See it? Go check out the x-axis....
View ArticleAnn's Blog: Muted Grid Lines: Small Details, Big Difference
Originally posted at Ann's Blog A few posts ago, I showed you this collage of area charts, which could be printed on 8.5 x 11 inch paper and used as a discussion starter at a meeting: This is made-up...
View ArticleAnn's Blog: Directly Labeling Your Line Graphs
Originally posted at Ann's Blog I recently saw this graph at http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding. The topic caught my attention but the labels made me cringe....
View ArticleAnn's Blog: How Many Decimal Places Are Helpful?
Originally posted at Ann's Blog How many decimal places does your graph actually need? 2, 1 or 0 decimal places? Most of my projects are in the social sciences. Social science measurement is not exact....
View ArticleAnn's Blog: Axis Labels, Data Labels, or Both? Four Line Graph Styles to...
Originally posted at Ann's Blog Data visualization is more about strategic thinking than about following steadfast rules. Take a simple line graph, for example. How will you label your line graph? With...
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