Office Hours 2024
Live Q+A Sessions with Ann K. Emery
Want to work on your report, dashboard, or infographic together?
Bring your drafts to Office Hours!
We meet for 60 minutes (almost) every week over Zoom.
Ask Me Anything
Here are some topics we've worked on recently:
- How to organize qualitative data in Excel
- The difference between radar charts and radial charts
- 4 different options for displaying pre and post data
- How to set up a spreadsheet to collect different type of program data (demographics, intake forms, attendance, outcomes, etc.)
- Designing dashboards (for internal technical audiences) vs. infographics (for external non-technical audiences) -- Different variables to include, how to vary the graph types and formatting, etc.
- Showing test score data on correct vs. incorrect responses
- Annotating charts to avoid having a huge Text Wall paragraph that nobody reads
- Font eyedroppers
- Icon arrays for small n's
- Grouping and ungrouping dates in pivot tables
- What to do if you only have one color in your logo
- Using nested if's to recode students' scores into percentiles and then groupings (e.g., a "74" is the 19% percentile, which falls into the 10-19 group)
Troubleshoot in a Small Group
We typically have 5-10 people join each week's Office Hours.
Catch the Replays
Yes, Office Hours are recorded in case you can't make it live.
Here's what's inside:
Course Curriculum
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StartRSVP to the Sessions
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StartJanuary 11: Feedback on a Static Excel Dashboard; Ideas for an Upcoming PowerBI Dashboard; How to Visualize Qualitative Data; How to Increase Engagement for Virtual Training Events (72:01)
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StartJanuary 25: Static Dashboards for Closed-Ended and Open-Ended Survey Responses; Tips on Building Your Org's Presentation Templates; an Annual Report in Infographic and Videographic Formats (54:45)
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StartFebruary 8: Annual Report for a Library; Subsections of a PPT Presentation; Analyzing Chat Comments; 2-Page Overview of Year 1 Achievements (111:42)
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StartFebruary 22: Transforming a Pie Chart; Setting Meeting Norms/Expectations at the Beginning of a Presentation; Mounds of Info across 10 Categories & 80 Indicators; Dealing with Muted Department Brand Colors (71:22)
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StartMarch 1: Copying and Pasting Sparklines into Word; Turning a Stacked Bar Chart into an Icon Stack; Turning a Dual-Axis Chart into Small Multiples; Using Others' Brand Colors in Our Presentations (54:01)
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StartMarch 5: How to Make Small Multiples Bar Charts and Small Multiples Stacked Bar Charts in Excel; Adding Icons for States, Provinces, or Countries to Graphs; Best Practices for Formatting Interactive Dashboards in Excel (61:34)
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StartMarch 26: Excel-Based Dashboards; Finding "the" Takeaway to Highlight in Graphs; Timeline illustrating Board Members' Terms; A 2-Page Report (Map made in Excel; Formatting Photos; etc.). (82:19)
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StartApril 11: Carefully Fitting Tons of Info on a Single Slide; Labeling a Bar Chart with Both Numbers and Percentages (with concatenation() and round()) (57:26)
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StartApril 22: RECURRING ANALYSES, WOOHOO! Cole's 2nd Year of Survey Responses; Mary's Ongoing Database Entries; Anna's Pivot Tables (73:19)
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StartMay 1: Melea's Dataset-Plus-Tabulation-in-One & How to Motivate Staff to Enter Data; Mary's Excel Table & Pivot Tables (continued); Maia's Excel Table & vlookup Question (69:56)
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StartMay 10: Adding & Refreshing Pivot Tables; Making Color-Coded Table Easier on the Eyes (Graying Out Most Cells, Bump Charts in Excel) (82:45)
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StartMay 17: Process for Setting Up Interactive Dashboards; Using Maps with Interactive Dashboards (via Helper Tables and Lookups); 1 Map with Symbols into Small Multiples Maps; a Quarterly Report Input Form; Deciding Which Numbers to Compare on a Dashboard (47:52)
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StartMay 20: Feedback on PowerPoint-Based Reports (76:34)
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StartMay 24: How a Nonprofit Can Combine Multiple Databases/Data Sources into a Single Dashboard (Power BI?); Auto-Generated Monthly Reports (Excel Tables, Pivot Tables); Making "Data Bars" More Readable (48:44)
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StartJune 4: Visual Appendices; Starting with the Broad Overview and Then Diving Deeper (or, Vice Versa) (53:31)
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StartAugust 15: How to Organize Pre-Post Test Spreadsheets; LinkedIn Strategy; Quick Feedback on a 2-Page Infographic (Small Multiples Donuts vs. Clustered Bars vs. Dot Plots) (58:00)
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StartAugust 29: SmartArt Pros & Cons; Trends and Benchmarks for 15 Measures; First Draft of a Report about Library Content (64:03)
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StartSeptember 5: Small Adjustments to Lisa's Excel-Based 2-Pager about Library Circulation Stats (71:04)
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StartSeptember 12: ISBLANK and IF Formulas; Making Sure Charts Have 2+ Data Points for a Dashboard; Using Pivot Tables, Slicers, and Pivot Charts to Find Patterns in South Carolina's Standardized Testing Dataset (87:23)
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StartSeptember 19: Interactive Dashboards - What if Only One Timepoint is Selected, and the Graph Shows... Nothing??; Tweaking Diverging Stacked Bar Charts in a Report (73:18)
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StartSeptember 26: Adjusting the Y-Axis Scale (e.g., turning 1,500,000 into 1.5 million); Adding "Embedded" Captions to Videos (PPT/Descript Tips); Adding Visuals to an Excel-Based Dashboard (Data Bars & Deviation Bars) (65:56)
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StartOctober 4: Analyzing Qualitative Data in Excel (Conditional Formatting, Thematic Coding, Pivot Tables); Troubleshooting a Line Chart with a Mysterious Gap/Break Between 2 Points (56:38)
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StartOctober 11: Rawan's Excel Survey (continued); Un-Squishing a One-Pager in PowerPoint (white space, font sizes, graph types, page layout) (95:23)
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StartOctober 18: Nit-Picking a Very Strong 2-Pager in Word; Adding Labels to a Tile Grid Map of the World; Quick Wins for a Conference Poster Made in PowerPoint (Text Hierarchy; White Space; etc.); Making Small Multiples Histograms for Survey Data (86:48)
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StartOctober 24: Quick Wins for Canva Reports & Landscape PPT Reports (66:36)
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StartNovember 1: Adding Labels to Line Graphs (Concatenation & Helper Cells); Turning a Paragraph into a Numbered List; Fixing #REF! Errors inside Concatenated Formulas; Turning a Dataset+Tabulation into Just Datasets or Just Tabulations (95:13)
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StartNovember 8: Circular References; Distinguishing between Datasets vs. Tabulated Data; Pros and Cons of Several Mapping Approaches (66:34)
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StartNovember 15: Final Review of an Excel-Based Short Report; Chart and Table Ideas for a Canva-Based Brief; Adding Headings and a Cover to a Nutrition Report in Word; Ideas for a Text-Only Report (61:39)
What Participants Are Saying
"I LOVE Office Hours! I learn so much from what everyone is doing and brings to get help and perspective on. I don't do client reports or evaluation work anymore (except for myself), but I have been focusing a lot on the visualization aspects of our career lives. Dataviz has underscored much of what I do in mentoring - and not for charts of numbers of people served and the like....
This week we had 1-pager discussions in Monday's Office Hours and again today. In Monday's Office Hours, I was inspired to write down 4 different 1-pagers I want to do for various aspects of #ProfessionalPresence and #ProfessionalBranding, after Barbara presented her 1-pager for feedback. Ann identified 7 quick wins with big impact - and Barbara worked on a couple more versions this week which Ann reviewed in today's Office Hours. Barbara had made great improvements in her 1-pager - and Ann showed us ways to get even more impact IN 1 PAGE!
These Office Hours sessions get my creative thinking going - even if I'm watching replays when I can't attend."
- Sue Griffey, SueMentors
"During the office hours, we mocked up what the graphs could look like and ultimately edited them to produce higher quality, easier to understand visuals...
Getting feedback from the group changed the style of the graphs, colors, way I utilized text, and I was even encouraged to turn the graphs into a GIF for better online engagement...
I was excited for the live office hour sessions when I would get to hear from someone else in the field and learn how they might use a graph style as well as how they did it...
Questions and discussions sparked thinking and problem solving about my data visualization in new ways, past the technical work in Excel...
The supportive community that was built goes beyond the technical skills we learned throughout the course, as I know I have a wider network to connect with for questions, feedback, and advice long after the course ended."
- Maddison Staszkiewicz, Evaluator, MaddisonStasz.com
About the Instructor
Your Instructor
Ann K. Emery is an internationally-acclaimed speaker who equips organizations to get their data out of dusty spreadsheets and into real-world conversations.
Each year, she delivers over 100 keynotes, workshops, and webinars with the aim of equipping organizations to visualize data more effectively.
She has been invited to speak in 31 states and 11 countries; 10,000 people have enrolled in her online training academy; and she has consulted to 200 organizations, including the United Nations, Centers for Disease Control, and Harvard University.
She earned a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia and a Master’s degree from George Mason University.
After traveling full-time as a digital nomad, Ann now resides in Florida along with her husband and five children.