Ann's Blog Evaluation, Data Analysis, & Dataviz

I’m celebrating 100,000 YouTube views with an article on my favorite spreadsheet function: vlookup! Vlookup is for merging and combining datasets, like when you’ve got program participants’ demographic data in one place and their scores or outcomes in another place. I can’t tell you how many…

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For the record, I had no clue that data visualization could be easy. As someone who’d spent two years working to understand and improve an organizational dashboard (not to mention an evaluation process), perhaps I should have known better. My assumption, for whatever reason, was…

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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 labeling… A generic title instead of a “so what?” title… You get the idea. Today I…

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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 collected paper copies of reports I worked on: Before The great sobering thing about portfolios is that…

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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 understanding of why better graphs were necessary, but they lacked efficient guidance on how, exactly, to make…

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