Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals

This was a textbook for one of my data visualization classes for my Master's degree. It is one of two books I have enjoyed reading. It was helpful for my class and has been helpful in my work as a data analyst. I recommend checking out Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic's blog, Storytelling With Data, as well. It will give you a nice idea of what the book is about.

I am a university professor who teaches biostatistics and I find this to be one of the best books that bridges the gap between analytics and presentation. There are some excellent books around that show visualization (e.g., The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics: The Dos and Don'ts of Presenting Data, Facts, and Figures or books by Few Information Dashboard Design: Displaying Data for At-a-Glance Monitoring & Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten or Cairo The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication) and there are good books on presentation (in particular I love Duarte's books Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences) but this book is unique in how well it blends the two topics. I have never seen such an excellent presentation on how to build a series of graphics. That is, with books by Few or Cairo you will know how to make *a* great graphic and with advice from Duarte, you can connect with your audience but with this book you will see how to build a series of interrelated graphics that highlight different parts of a dataset. Most of the examples are spun around business but the examples are easy to extend to any field.While I think the author wrote this for people who do presentations in any quantitative field for a living, this book should be required reading for graduate students preparing to defend a dissertation or thesis.

There is some good stuff in here.I like Knaflic’s focus on intentionality. For her, the defaults are something that should be avoided, or at least justified.I like how she looks at the presentation of graphic information as a story arc. There is one thing that you want to focus on to create actionable decisions. This is best, as she describes, if you are presenting. There are limitations if you have a static document that has information for multiple stakeholders.The book is accessibly written with a clean font and plenty of examples.However, I do have to push back a bit. She follows Tufte in trying to eliminate data ink. Part of the intentionality is that you have less and less information on the page and every thing you includes helps tell your story. For me though that leads to a sameness. You want your audience to not have to think so hard. You want to make sure they don’t have their eyes glaze over. But that means that everything is very simple with a muted palette. The author notes that some of these are just her preference, but the mode of thinking has become influential. Part of me wants my audience to do some work in understanding the text I put in front of them. It means a level of engagement that I worry a too-simple graph leaves out.

I work in the project controls arena of large projects that have hundreds, if not thousands of people working on them. A key requirement for project controls is to keep all project personnel informed about the project status. Needless to say engineering plays a major role on these projects and brings lots of data with them; pages and pages of it. As the author points out the analytical types are not necessarily trained on how to tell a story (i.e. communicate) with their data.For the last 10 years or so, I have developed methods for getting the project story down to a single graphic. It's usually a large graphic, but a single one. It has the effect of getting everyone on the same page. But for people who are not used to looking at this type of presentation, it can be overwhelming or as the author points out they have to work at it in order to understand it. This was a key point for me.Before I finished the book, I started making changes in my work products. They were small changes, but the feedback was very positive. One example, do you ever note information in page footers like date, time and maybe filename and path? Does anyone think to put them in the background by using a shade of gray instead of the default black? No! Try it. Then ask for opinions It doesn't sound like much, but it's reducing the competition on people's focus.This book is great! It's fairly short to read and has a lot of examples making it easy to follow the author's intent. She obviously is very good at her profession. If I had to pick one book as a recommendation to someone who wants to learn about making great presentation graphics, I will point to this book. I highly recommend it. But, the book doesn't stop there, the author has included a listing of resources (e.g. books and websites) for continued learning.