Data Storytelling in Business: A Foundation for Clear Communication

Not only data analysis who build dashboard should read this, but also all the people who view dashboard and reports

Over the years every time I have a new employee I buy them a copy as this is such a good practical guide about telling stories with data.

Gets you started in building visuals and content. Lots of good tips and tricks and gets you thinking of the story you are trying to tell.

This book is concise. Every sentence in it imparts very useful lesson for day to day application. I love this.

Essential, mandatory, elemental, critical, indispensable.

There is some good stuff in here.

I like Knaflic’s focus on intentionality. For her, the defaults are something that should be avoided, or at least justified.

I like how she looks at the presentation of graphic information as a story arc. There is one thing that you want to focus on to create actionable decisions. This is best, as she describes, if you are presenting. There are limitations if you have a static document that has information for multiple stakeholders.

The book is accessibly written with a clean font and plenty of examples.

However, I do have to push back a bit. She follows Tufte in trying to eliminate data ink. Part of the intentionality is that you have less and less information on the page and every thing you includes helps tell your story. For me though that leads to a sameness. You want your audience to not have to think so hard. You want to make sure they don’t have their eyes glaze over. But that means that everything is very simple with a muted palette. The author notes that some of these are just her preference, but the mode of thinking has become influential. Part of me wants my audience to do some work in understanding the text I put in front of them. It means a level of engagement that I worry a too-simple graph leaves out.