Data Visualization in Excel: Conversation with Jonathan Schwabish

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        Jonathan Schwabish is an economist at the Urban Institute where he researches programs that support low-income communities. In addition to that work, he is a writer, teacher, and a leading voice for clarity and accessibility in how researchers communicate their analyses. He helps nonprofits, research institutions, and governments at all levels improve how they communicate their work and findings to their partners, constituents, and citizens. You can find out more about Jon and his work on his site, PolicyViz, and sign up for his newsletter here.

In this conversation, he talks about his new book, Data Visualization in Excel.

Geetesh: Jon, after your books on better presentations and better data visualizations, you now look directly at achieving some amazing results within Excel in your new book, Data Visualization in Excel. What motivated you to write this book, and who is your target audience?

Jon: With this book, I want to enable readers to implement the lessons from my previous book directly in Excel. When teaching a data visualization or presentation skills workshop, one of the comments I often hear is how to actually build the graph or make the slides. Learning those skills—how to create better graphs and charts in Excel—is usually relegated to blogs and YouTube videos, so I wanted to write a more comprehensive guide that people could use in their everyday work.

I generally think of my target audience as the small nonprofit organization with say, 12 to 20 people. The group may have designated someone as the “data” person and thrust them into that role because they showed some affinity or enjoyment for working with data. That person may not have the time or inclination to learn a programming language like R or D3, and their colleagues and partners all use the Microsoft Office, so it’s natural for them to start there.

That said, the Excel graphing library is fairly limited, with just ten or so classes of graph types in the Excel drop-down menu. But if that person wanted to try something new, make something a bit more engaging, or fundamentally visualize the data in different ways, they can still do that in Excel, even if it can be a little daunting to expand past the built-in menu. My goal in Data Visualization in Excel is to make that jump less daunting by demonstrating the philosophy of moving beyond the standard chart types and also showing—in step-by-step instructions—how to do so.

Geetesh: Nowadays, everyone speaks in terms like big data and visualizations, and I could not help noticing that you have been quite ambitious with Excel in this book. So, how doable are these results for newbies or intermediate users? Is there a proficiency level that this book assumes?

Jon: My hope is that both the new and experienced Excel user can learn through this book how to use Excel better and more efficiently. The opening chapters are designed for the Excel newbie—I explain the Excel interface and some of the basic formulas that are used throughout the book including IF, AND, VLOOKUP, and more. But I also denote the areas of those introductory chapters where I think even experienced Excel users could benefit, which comes from years of experience teaching Excel to a wide range of people. For example, what do you do if you want to use one of the newer chart types in Excel—such as a treemap or box-and-whisker chart—but don’t know how to set up the data? My advice is to insert one of those charts in PowerPoint because PowerPoint will create a version of the graph based on placeholder data, which you can then use as a template for your data in Excel.

In addition to the detailed step-by-step instructions and accompanying annotated screenshots, I also provide a list of Quick Instructions at the end of each lesson. This summary is just a truncated list of instructions that the more experienced user can rely on without having to go through each detailed step, or the newer user can refer to as a quick refresher. I’ve also provided a number of Excel files for readers to use in their own work, so they don’t need to start from scratch for each graph.

Obviously, more experienced Excel users will pick up some of the lessons more quickly than newer users, but my hope is that this book can be used by Excel users with all levels of expertise.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.