When social scientists like me have lots of data, we tend to put it in tables. There’s nothing wrong with tables. They contain infinite details within a finite and teeny space, and they give the reader freedom to draw his or her own conclusions about which details…
I remember the exact moment when I discovered–and got addicted to–data visualization. I was an internal evaluator at a 300-person human services organization. Being an internal evaluator means your “clients” are your coworkers who work down the hall from you. You talk to each other about…
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…
![Who knew dataviz could be so easy? [Guest post by Stephen Alexander]](/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/alexander_remake.png)
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…
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…