April 7: A quick review of the March 18th session; in-depth coverage of best practices. Hands-on practice with direct labels, in-line labels, RGB codes, action colors, and one or two advanced charts such as population pyramids or diverging stacked bar charts.
Target Audience
Evaluators and evaluation consumers with an interest in presenting research and evaluation findings more effectively through charts, graphs, tables, and diagrams. This webinar series is especially aimed at analysts who want to move quickly through the basics and dive into the more advanced techniques.
¡Milwaukee Evaluation! Inc. and Ann K. Emery have joined forces to offer you a virtual data visualization workshop this spring! During our two sessions together, we’ll walk through Ann’s five-step Data Visualization Design Process so that you can apply this framework to your own projects. First, we'll discuss contextual considerations, like whether the present the data as-is or tell a story for your stakeholders, whether to aggregate or disaggregate the data, and how many points in time to display. Second, we’ll discuss another contextual consideration that’s crucial during up-front planning: how will you ultimately share your completed charts? Ann will share strategies for adapting your charts for Word reports, PowerPoint reports, live PowerPoint presentations, visual executive summaries, and more. Third, you'll get an introduction to chart choosing skills. The instructor will explain the pros and cons of various chart types, and you’ll understand when to swap out pie charts and bar charts for options like slope charts, tree maps, social network maps, or dot plots. We’ll pause for hands-on application in Excel and you’ll practice exploratory visualization skills by creating spark lines, data bars, and heat tables. Fourth, Ann will briefly touch on the pros and cons of common software options, including Excel, Tableau, R, CartoDB, and several others. And fifth, Ann will teach you her Simplification and Emphasis approach to editing graphs, in which you simplify the less-important borders, grid lines, and tick marks and then emphasize the most-important pieces with text and color. Although these universal best practices can be applied in any software program, we’ll pause frequently during this fifth step of the design process for hands-on practice in Excel. For example, after Ann discusses how to guide your stakeholders’ eyes to the critical pieces of your chart with color saturation, she’ll demonstrate the click-by-click process for customizing Excel’s color palette through live screensharing. You’ll receive the Excel file in advance so you can participate from the comfort of your own desk. Then, Ann will share easy-to-implement graphic design secrets for combining multiple charts into infographics, dashboards, and other types of one-page summaries. Finally, we’ll conclude with the latest techniques for creating charts that aren’t traditionally available within Excel, like population pyramids, diverging stacked bar charts, and/or other advanced layouts upon request.
