This is a great overview of data visualization for beginners with useful insights for presentation and communication. If you hate charts and graphs, this book MAY remove some of your apprehension about working wtih them. But as Knaflic says in the book, it's definitely a skill that needs to be practiced before you can internalize it.

Basically, the book explains the challenges and value of data visualization, then breaks it the process into 6 steps. You can use it for a presentation or for email/written communication (tho' it's skewed toward the former).

What it covers:
• How to define the context of your communication, including your Who-what-how, core message and storyline;
• Which types of visual displays to consider, which ones to avoid, and the dos and don’ts for your visuals;
• Rhe Gestalt Principles and other useful principles to eliminate visual clutter;
• How people read or process materials, and how you can use a range of preattentive attributes to direct your audience’s focus to the right place and with the right sequence to achieve your goal;
• How you can think like a designer and master the principles of Affordances, Accessibility, Aesthetics, and Acceptance.
• How to construct your story with a 3-part narrative arc, and to strengthen it with several strategies.

Book summary at: https://readingraphics.com/book-summary-storytelling-with-data/ ( )

“Storytelling com Dados é admiravelmente bem escrito, uma amostra magistral de rara arte no mundo dos negócios. Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic possui uma habilidade única - um dom - em contar histórias usando dados. No JP Morgan Chase, ela ajudou a melhorar nossa capacidade de explicar análises complicadas para a gerência executiva e para os reguladores com quem trabalhamos. O livro de Cole reúne seus talentos em um guia fácil de ler, com exemplos excelentes que qualquer um pode aprender para estimular a tomada de decisão mais inteligente.” ―Mark R. Hillis, diretor-chefe do setor de riscos de hipoteca bancária do JPM Chase.“Temos tantos dados que pode ser difícil para as pessoas prestarem atenção em nossas principais descobertas. Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic nos ensinou valiosas lições em seu workshop e é fantástico vê-las aprofundadas no Storytelling com Dados. Minha equipe já está usando as lições ensinadas por Cole para fazer as pessoas agirem ao identificarem novas pérolas de entendimento e fazer a diferença na vida de outros. Agora outras pessoas também podem fazer isso!” - Eleanor Bell, Diretora de Analítica Comercial da Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Back in my first programming job after college, I was dabbling in graphics for some bit of computer code that analyzed genetic data. I read some works by Edward Tufte, an expert from Yale who made academic munch-meat of visualization data for his career. The verbiage was lofty; the images were inspiring; and I could not figure out how to translate the lofty rhetoric and aesthetics into meaningful graphics and meaningful insight.

Twenty years later, enter Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic. Cole translated the practicalities of how to handle Microsoft Excel and a dataset into meaningful visualizations. I spend a significant portion of my time at work trying to generate graphics that will mean something to someone somewhere (read for an undisclosed audience), and I would benefit from understanding how visualizations work better.

From Cole, I learned how to translate anything into a bar chart, how to simplify a series of numbers into something that will communicate quickly and effectively, and how never to use a pie chart or a donut chart to clog visual communication. This work fills the gap between more academic works (such as Tufte's, inspiring but lofty) and the practicalities of doing everyday graphics on a budget.

Most interesting are the resources used in this work. The text references many books and blogs that can be consulted for further insight. (Confession: I have already bought two of these books, checked-out one from the library, and bookmarked eleven blogs.) The literature review has proved to make this book worth it in and of itself.

Simple tricks (like adjusting the alignment of the headers for axes to left or right instead of center) that enhance readability also make this book worth its weight in gold bar-charts. If you have a friend who is an artist and have a budget to pay her well, seek after Tufte's work for inspiration. But if you want to garner the technical know-how to transform some data points into something meaningful, elegant, and effective, I suggest this work for you.
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This is an engaging and approachable entry-level book on data presentation in business contexts. Knaflic covers some foundational graphic design and layout principles for a number of effective graph types, all within a framework of knowing your audience and conveying your message.

A great book to help you create better charts/graphs. (Note: I call them charts because I use Excel – graphs may be the correct term.)

The book explains many visualisation concepts and backs it up with step by step examples of improving charts.

The before and after charts speak for themselves.

The book also places emphasis on identifying the message you are seeking to convey to the reader of your chart and making sure you are using the best chart to get that message across.

With dashboards being the buzz at the moment learning how to best display your information is a good skill to have. ( )