Telling a Rich, Coherent Story

This picture has been on the wall of every office I have worked in for the last twenty or more years! However, it has been in my garage during the last year since I started working for myself, but I finally found time to reorganise my home office, and it is back, where it belongs, beside my desk.

It reminds me how important it is to really think about how your data is presented. While Excel is great at quickly pulling data together into a chart, it is not so good at combining multiple streams of data and showing relationships and causality. PowerPoint has the advantage of allowing you to progress through multiple graphs in sequence to show their relationships, but neither can match this hand-drawn masterpiece for clarity and linking dates, locations, temperature and size of the army throughout the campaign.

Every time you present data, remember that you are telling a story, so make sure that your charts highlight the key points and identify all trends. Don’t just accept the first type of chart that Excel recommends; explore alternatives and see if they make more sense or identify something that perhaps you hadn’t previously noticed. And sometimes, you may even need to think outside of the (Excel) box and create your own artistic interpretation, to really get the point across.