{"id":2915,"date":"2022-03-31T18:01:58","date_gmt":"2022-03-31T18:01:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.library.duke.edu\/data\/?p=2915"},"modified":"2022-04-12T11:51:49","modified_gmt":"2022-04-12T11:51:49","slug":"jon-schwabish-excel-data-visualization-hero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.library.duke.edu\/data\/2022\/03\/31\/jon-schwabish-excel-data-visualization-hero\/","title":{"rendered":"Jon Schwabish \u2013 Excel Data Visualization Hero!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two data visualization topics that people occasionally request are presentation design and Excel skills. We have a couple older videos on Basic Data Cleaning and Analysis for Data Tables<\/a>, and Advanced Excel for Data Projects<\/a> in our CDVS Online Learning page<\/a>; and the storytelling and graphic design principles I cover in my Effective Academic Posters presentation<\/a> apply equally well to presentations; but in case you haven\u2019t heard of him before, I want to tell you about a master of these topics, one of my data visualization heroes, Jon Schwabish, founder of PolicyViz<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Besides his emphasis on clear communication of results, one of the things I admire most about Schwabish is his focus on Microsoft Excel as a legitimate tool for crafting that communication. While not free and open-source, it\u2019s a piece of software that many people have access to, and despite some of its limitations (e.g. reproducibility issues), it is a very capable tool for data processing and visualization. If you want to make lots of people better communicators, teach them how to use the tools they already have!<\/p>\n

Of course, visit policyviz.com<\/a> and the PolicyViz YouTube channel<\/a> to access the plethora of resources Jon is constantly generating, but to get you started I want to point out a few of my favorites.<\/p>\n

I get frustrated that Excel doesn\u2019t have a built-in, easy way to make horizontal dot plots with error bars. (On the med-side they tend to call these Forest plots<\/a>, although they are useful whenever you have categories and a quantity with confidence intervals. Don’t just create a table \u2013 make it visual with a plot!) Jon\u2019s Labeling Dot Plots blog post<\/a> and accompanying YouTube video<\/a> was super useful \u2013 it taught me a general approach for using scatterplots in Excel to create a variety of chart types that Excel doesn\u2019t support natively! The method is a pain the first time you do it, and I get a bit belligerent because I hate that you have to employ this workaround, but it\u2019s so brilliant and flexible that I\u2019m tempted to teach a CDVS workshop on just this one chart type. More broadly, he also has an Excel Tutorials<\/a> section of his YouTube channel, and he sells a PDF on his website called A Step-by-Step Guide to Advanced Data Visualization in Excel 2016<\/a>.\"\"<\/a>One of the best ways to become a better visualizer and communicator is to get feedback on your work and iterate through multiple drafts. To compliment that, it\u2019s wonderful to get an expert’s take on a published visualization, along with proposed alternatives. For years Jon has been publishing brillant visualization redesigns on his blog<\/a>. He doesn\u2019t just criticize \u2013 he shows you alternatives and talks about their strengths and weaknesses. There is also a DataViz Critiques section<\/a> on his YouTube channel.<\/p>\n

In early 2021 he released over 50 daily videos in a series called One Chart at a Time<\/a> where visualization experts \u201cexpand your graphic literacy\u201d and \u201chelp you learn about more than just the standard bar, line, and pie chart.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Along with Alice Feng, Schwabish published in 2021 the “Do No Harm Guide: Applying Equity Awareness in Data Visualization”. You can download the report at urban.org<\/a> and listen to a talk they gave about it on YouTube<\/a> to get their reflections on \u201chow data practitioners can approach their work through a lens of diversity, equity, and inclusion \u2026 to encourage thoughtfulness in how analysts work with and present their data.\u201d<\/p>\n

Finally, people are always asking me what books they should read to get better at visualization. Take a look at Schwabish\u2019s books<\/a>, along with his lists of recommended DataViz books<\/a> and Presentation books<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two data visualization topics that people occasionally request are presentation design and Excel skills. We have a couple older videos on Basic Data Cleaning and Analysis for Data Tables, and Advanced Excel for Data Projects in our CDVS Online Learning page; and the storytelling and graphic design principles I cover in my Effective Academic Posters … Continue reading Jon Schwabish \u2013 Excel Data Visualization Hero!<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":242,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[55],"class_list":["post-2915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-data-visualization","tag-data-visualization-2"],"yoast_head":"\nJon Schwabish \u2013 Excel Data Visualization Hero! - Duke Libraries Center for Data and Visualization Sciences<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.library.duke.edu\/data\/2022\/03\/31\/jon-schwabish-excel-data-visualization-hero\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Jon Schwabish \u2013 Excel Data Visualization Hero! - Duke Libraries Center for Data and Visualization Sciences\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Two data visualization topics that people occasionally request are presentation design and Excel skills. 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