Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals

by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic

“Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely.” —Edward Tufte, Yale Professor Emeritus1

Pretty much anyone can put some data into a graphing application (for example, Excel) and create a graph. This is important to consider, so I will repeat myself: anyone can put some data into a graphing application and create a graph. This is remarkable, considering that the process of creating a graph was historically reserved for scientists or those in other highly technical roles. And scary, because without a clear path to follow, our best intentions and efforts (combined with oft-questionable tool defaults) can lead us in some really bad directions: 3D, meaningless color, pie charts.

Exploratory analysis is what you do to understand the data and figure out what might be noteworthy or interesting to highlight to others.