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Presenting Data in
EXCEL!

Presented By
Sena Loyd, @Two Digital Learning Center Manager, Carson City Library
sloyd@carson.org, 775-887-2244 x1018
PRESENTING DATA IN EXCEL
PRESENTING DATA IN EXCEL
PRESENTING DATA IN EXCEL
CLEANING UP YOUR PRESENTATION
Remove Noise From Your Cart’s Background
Move The Legend
Delete Legends With One Data Series
Add A Descriptive Title
Sort Your Data Before Charting
Don’t Make Peoples Heads Tilt
Clean Up Your Axe
Missing Thousands Separators
Cluttered Axes
Unnecessary Decimals
Decimals Instead of Percentages
Weird Zero Formatting

Explore Other Themes
Create Branded Charts
Make Your Chart Title Dynamic
PRESENTING DATA IN EXCEL

NOT THAT!

DO THIS!
PRESENTING DATA IN EXCEL

NOT THAT!
DO THIS!
PRESENTING DATA IN EXCEL

DO THIS!
PRESENTING DATA IN EXCEL

NOT THAT!
PRESENTING DATA IN EXCEL

DO THIS!
PRESENTING DATA IN EXCEL

NOT THAT!
PRESENTING DATA IN EXCEL

NOT THAT!
PRESENTING DATA IN EXCEL

DO THIS!
NOT THAT!

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Presenting Data In Excel

Editor's Notes

  1. When you’re presenting data, it’s very important to reduce the noise and hone in on actionable signals. If you have read just about anything I’ve written about Excel, you’ll know I loathe gridlines in tables. And yet, until I viewed this presentation by Ian Lurie, I was blissfully oblivious to gridlines in charts. But then, they cause my eye to stumble, too. And that’s the problem with noise: it distracts you from the essential stuff. Gridlines are super easy to get rid of. First, remember the formatting trick I mention in all of my posts: if you want to format anything in Excel (in a chart or table) just select it and press Ctrl-1 (Mac: Command-1) to open the formatting dialog specific to that item. In this case, you’ll just want to select one of the gridlines in your chart (anyone but the top one, which selects the entire plot area) and then open the formatting options. Finally, select Line Color > No line (Mac: Line > Solid > Color: No Line). I don’t know why Excel positions the legend to the right of a chart by default. In most cases, it’s terribly awkward. I prefer to move the legend to the top or bottom of a chart. I tend to put the legend above more than below, but I’ll put it below if there’s too much going on at the top, or sometimes, with a pie chart. To move it, just pull up the formatting option (you should know how by now!) and choose the position from Legend Options category, which is called Placement on a Mac. With the legend still selected, I usually bump the font up to 12 as well. You don’t have to select the text, just the box. You be the judge which looks better… If you’re only showing one metric on a chart, there’s no reason to keep the legend that Excel throws in there. Just make sure you include the metric you’re showing in the chart title. A common mistake I see with marketers’ charts is they’re oftentimes missing a title. When you’re the one pulling together the data, everything you’re trying to communicate is perfectly clear. But for others who have to try to figure out what you’re trying to communicate, it’s not always so apparent. This one is actually a big deal to me. Charts that are spawned from unsorted data are, in my opinion, much more difficult to read and interpret. If you’re showing something sequential, like visits per day over a period of a month or revenue per month over a period of a year, then ordering your data chronologically makes the most sense. In the absence of a dominant sort pattern like that, I’m of the opinion that data should be ordered and presented in descending order to put the most significant data first. If you look at the data in the chart immediately below, I think you’ll agree that your eyes have to dart back and forth to sort the channels by revenue. This can make data interpretation laborious and vulnerable to misinterpretation. If you have longer labels, it’s better to expand your chart enough to make room for the axis labels to be displayed horizontally or (even better) use a bar chart instead of a column chart, like so: