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Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals

Stop drowning in spreadsheets and start building high-impact charts that drive faster decision-making.

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About This Course

Storytelling with Data helps professionals cut through the noise. Often, good data gets ignored because the message isn't clear. Or, worse, it's misunderstood. This isn't about fancy tools, it’s about the underlying thinking.

We've all seen projects stall when insights can't land. You'll work through 13 Hands-on Labs, 21 Practice Exercises, and 11 Comprehensive Chapters. This course won't turn you into a graphic designer overnight; it just aims to make your data presentations effective enough to drive action. It's about avoiding common pitfalls and ensuring your efforts actually connect.

Skills You’ll Get

Contextual Framing: Projects often go sideways when the audience doesn't grasp why this data matters to them specifically. Visual Selection: Using the wrong chart means your key point gets buried, or worse, completely misinterpreted. Clutter Elimination: Without this, your audience gets lost in details, missing the critical insight you're trying to convey. Audience Focus: Important findings get overlooked if you don't intentionally guide eyes to what truly matters.
Download Course Outline

1

Introduction

  • Bad graphs are everywhere
  • We aren’t naturally good at storytelling with data
  • Who this course is written for
  • How I learned to tell stories with data
  • How you’ll learn to tell stories with data: 6 lessons
  • Illustrative examples span many industries
  • Lessons are not tool specific
  • How this course is organized
2

The Importance Of Context

  • Exploratory vs. explanatory analysis
  • Who, what, and how
  • Who
  • What
  • How
  • Who, what, and how: illustrated by example
  • Consulting for context: questions to ask
  • The 3-minute story & Big Idea
  • Storyboarding
  • In closing
3

Choosing An Effective Visual

  • Simple text
  • Tables
  • Graphs
  • Points
  • Lines
  • Bars
  • Area
  • Other types of graphs
  • To be avoided
  • In closing
4

Clutter Is Your Enemy!

  • Cognitive load
  • Clutter
  • Gestalt principles of visual perception
  • Lack of visual order
  • Non-strategic use of contrast
  • Decluttering: step-by-step
  • In closing
5

Focus Your Audience’s Attention

  • You see with your brain
  • A brief lesson on memory
  • Preattentive attributes signal where to look
  • Size
  • Color
  • Position on page
  • In closing
6

Think Like A Designer

  • Affordances
  • Accessibility
  • Aesthetics
  • Acceptance
  • In closing
7

Dissecting Model Visuals

  • Model visual #1: line graph
  • Model visual #2: annotated line graph with forecast
  • Model visual #3: 100% stacked bars
  • Model visual #4: leveraging positive and negative stacked bars
  • Model visual #5: horizontal stacked bars
  • In closing
8

Lessons In Storytelling

  • The magic of story
  • Constructing the story
  • The narrative structure
  • The power of repetition
  • Tactics to help ensure that your story is clear
  • In closing
9

Pulling It All Together

  • Lesson 1: understand the context
  • Lesson 2: choose an appropriate display
  • Lesson 3: eliminate clutter
  • Lesson 4: draw attention where you want your audience to focus
  • Lesson 5: think like a designer
  • Lesson 6: tell a story
  • In closing
10

Case Studies

  • CASE STUDY 1: Color considerations with a dark background
  • CASE STUDY 2: Leveraging animation in the visuals you present
  • CASE STUDY 3: Logic in order
  • CASE STUDY 4: Strategies for avoiding the spaghetti graph
  • CASE STUDY 5: Alternatives to pies
  • In closing
11

Final Thoughts

  • Where to go from here
  • Building storytelling with data competency in your team or organization
  • Recap: a quick look at all we’ve learned
  • In closing

1

Choosing An Effective Visual

  • Storytelling at the Cafe
  • Choosing an Effective Visual in Excel
  • Creating and Interpreting a Scatterplot in Excel
  • Creating a Line Graph and Slopegraph in Excel
  • Creating a Bar Chart and Waterfall chart in Excel
2

Focus Your Audience’s Attention

3

Think Like A Designer

  • Designing Effective Data Visualizations in Excel
4

Dissecting Model Visuals

  • Creating an Annotated Line Graph with Forecast in Excel
  • Creating a Storytelling Line Graph in Excel
  • Creating a 100% Stacked Bar Chart in Excel
  • Creating Horizontal Stacked Bar Charts in Excel
5

Lessons In Storytelling

  • Creating Positive and Negative Stacked Bars in Excel
6

Pulling It All Together

  • BackgroundOn a Saturday morning in the kitchen, ...ck the Start button to begin their conversation.
7

Case Studies

  • Storytelling with Data in Excel
8

Final Thoughts

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No, the lessons focus on universal principles. You won't master Tableau or Power BI here, but you'll know what good looks like.

Immediate changes in your approach are possible. Real mastery takes consistent practice; it's not a quick fix for deep-seated habits.

The design principles are practical, not artistic. It's about making data consumable, not about creating pretty pictures.

The core ideas apply broadly. However, specific examples lean towards business scenarios, so direct translation might need some thought.

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