2025-09-04 21:40:00
If there were one myth I could debunk when it comes to business communications, it would be the belief that in all cases, the more slides you have, the longer your presentation will be.
Often, when managers or meeting organizers want to limit the time a team member presents, they will mandate a slide restriction. This stems from the belief that the number of slides and minutes presented are related.
This notion is silly because it depends on how you use your slides. There have been instances when I talked to a single slide for over ten minutes, and other times when a slide was only visible for 10-15 seconds before moving on to the next.
Connecting the quantity of slides you share to the number of minutes you discuss them isn’t as clear-cut as it may seem, and in my experience, it can be counterproductive. Say there is an upcoming business meeting with a packed agenda:
To ensure each topic can be discussed, all presenters are told to create only one or two slides. This allows the meeting deck to remain at a reasonable size and keep the meeting moving.
Unfortunately, while the slide count is low, the individual slides are usually packed with tons of information that is scaled down to fit.
A significant amount of time is wasted during the meeting simply trying to explain what’s on the slide and how to read it, because the audience is too overwhelmed to process it independently.
How many of us have faced this exact situation? More distressingly, how often are we the overwhelmed audience, slumped in our chairs, wishing that someone hadn’t tried to add the entire encyclopedia into a single PowerPoint slide?
A better alternative when faced with this scenario is to control minutes, not slide counts. If you are running a meeting, give your team a time limit for presenting and for answering questions. Empower them to decide how many slides they need—if any—to accomplish this. If you are contributing to a meeting, be sure to ask how much time you have, and prioritize the timing constraint over all other considerations.
This is a recommendation I made while leading a customized training session with a corporate client earlier this year. The main goal of the day was to upskill the team’s ability to communicate effectively with various audiences, particularly leaders.
Prior to our training session, the group shared examples of how they have communicated with data in the past. It’s helpful when an organization tells me about the challenges they are facing, but I can usually uncover much more when examining their existing graphs, reports, and slides.
The following slide was part of a deck shared at a previous board meeting. The goal was to discuss the competitive broadband market, and reassure board members that the company remained the top provider in the city, despite increased competition.
Before you critique the slide, it’s worth understanding the requirements. The team was instructed to create just one slide to discuss this matter, as the plan was to spend only 5-10 minutes on the topic. The team knew that pie charts probably weren’t the best solution, but resigned to using them because of the one-slide mandate.
To demonstrate to the group that slide count and minutes do not necessarily go hand in hand, I redesigned the data story using the same information. My version used nine slides and could be discussed in two minutes. I also had more space, so I explored other chart types, such as slope graphs and square area charts.
Feel free to watch the short presentation below. (All of the details have been changed to protect confidentiality.)
The next time you are faced with a slide constraint, do your best to recognize that slides and minutes aren’t proportional, and they aren’t equal. If you need to keep business presentations short and targeted, then the amount of time talking is more important than the number of slides used to convey that point.
If you enjoy seeing how we help real teams improve their business communications via example, order our latest book: storytelling with data: before & after. We share 20 powerful transformations of business communications from our client trainings. You can download a sample today, or join our launch team for early access to the book in exchange for your promotion.
2025-09-02 21:13:00
MIKE | For many years, we here at storytelling with data have been singing the praises of the wildly popular guide to designing business intelligence products, the Big Book of Dashboards. Traditionally, we think of dashboards as one of the best ways to explore your data, and at SWD, we focus most of our efforts toward helping folks improve the way they explain their data. That's why we've always found the Big Book of Dashboards and the books in the SWD library to be wonderful complements to each other. For the data analyst who wanted to upskill the full range of their abilities, this combination has served them well.
We were thrilled when we found out that our friends Andy Cotgreave, Amanda Makulec, Jeffrey Shaffer, and Steve Wexler were getting ready to publish the eagerly-awaited follow-up to this iconic work, entitled Dashboards That Deliver. It's slated to be released to the public on September 23, 2025—as it happens, the exact same day that we release our latest book, storytelling with data: before & after!
We decided that there was no better way to celebrate this happy coincidence than to bring the DTD and the SWD:B&A authors together for one mega-challenge here in September. We hope you enjoy it; we hope you participate; and we hope that on September 23, you're adding two great new books to your data visualization collection. And now, to introduce this month's challenge, here’s Amanda.
AMANDA | Dashboards evolve as user needs change, so revisions happen in the real world—and in this month’s SWD challenge! This challenge isn’t just about making a prettier design: it’s about creating a dashboard that serves a clear purpose. That goal is at the heart of our new book, Dashboards That Deliver, which teaches a user-centered, Agile framework for dashboard design that anyone can adapt in their work. Dashboards should have a clear spark (why they’re created), audience, and set of analytical goals, otherwise the most beautiful interfaces will spark more "ooh-ahh" than "ah-ha!"
Both Dashboards That Deliver and storytelling with data: before & after champion the value of iterative design, showcasing how prototyping, feedback, and seemingly simple revisions to charts and dashboards can reshape how people explore data and grasp key takeaways.
The challenge celebrates both books by focusing on a dashboard redesign.
For the challenge, we invite you to revisit a dashboard that could use a refresh and refocus. You can choose one of your old dashboards, or pick a dashboard from the Big Book of Dashboards, many of which are available on the book website. Then, spend a few minutes mapping out your intended audience for the redesigned dashboard and their analytical needs, both of which should inform your redesign.
We celebrate the value of mockups for quick feedback on dashboard concepts, so the format of your submission can be images only (allowing you to use prototyping tools like Figma to mockup new designs) or a fully-built workbook (in which case, post images here, but include a link to the interactive dashboard on the web). Feel free to include annotations or comments to clarify your intended interactivity. In either case, your final submission should include the original dashboard, your redesign, and notes on who your intended audience, what design decisions you made, and what questions people will be able to answer with your new and improved version.
If you’re not using one of the dashboards from the Big Book of Dashboards, we recommend redesigning a dashboard that you have created in the past, where you have ownership of the content and insights around the dashboard use case, or a dashboard that is widely shared and public facing (for example, a COVID dashboard). Please do not select and redesign work by others without their permission! Feedback should be given kindly and by request only.
Share your refreshed dashboard in the SWD community by Sepember 30th at 5PM PT. (If you’re not yet a member of the community, sign up here. It’s totally free and takes about 30 seconds.) If there is any specific feedback or input that you would find helpful, include that detail in your commentary. The DTD and SWD teams will comment on the submissions throughout the course of the month. And finally, tune into the video podcast Chart Chat on October 30 at 11am ET, where the DTD and SWD teams will share and celebrate some of their favorite redesigns from the challenge.
Here are some additional resources to help you redesign your dashboard:
Big Book of Dashboards website and sample dashboards - bigbookofdashboards.com
Dashboards That Deliver website - dashboardsthatdeliver.com
There will be a "Designing Dashboards That Deliver" webinar on Datacamp on Tuesday, September 23 (book release day!) at 11am ET. Registration is here: https://www.datacamp.com/webinars/dashboards-that-deliver-part-1-concepts
2025-08-13 22:55:27
Have you ever struggled to do something you know you want—or need—to do? For example, is it hard to get to the gym regularly, even though you know it's good for your health? Or perhaps you keep putting off practicing that second language, even though you know it's essential for your learning progress. You’re not alone! Knowing what we should do is one thing; actually doing it is another.
I was recently reminded of this challenge while reviewing some feedback about our on-demand course. (I read every single response!) The person said:
”The content was great and a good refresher of things I already knew
...even if I don't always remember to apply them.”
When you commit to doing something regularly, you transform a simple good intention into a lasting habit, and that’s where real growth and change begin. Still, building those habits can be difficult without support.
If you find yourself struggling to implement better data storytelling techniques and want to make practicing effective communication a goal, I invite you to join our upcoming 8-week online course. Our final cohort of the year is about to commence on September 15, making it the perfect next step to deepen your skills in a structured, guided, and practice-driven environment.
Over eight short weeks, my colleague Simon and I will teach you a practical, repeatable process to plan your data story, distill the critical components, create effective graphs, slides, and presentations, and communicate it all in a way that gets your audience’s attention, builds understanding, and drives action. We’ll guide you on this journey with live lectures (recordings will be available) that provide opportunities to practice, ask questions, and get feedback. We’ll also have two optional weekly office hours sessions to ensure you are supported.
The highlight of the course is the final project, which gives you a chance to apply the lessons to a dataset of your own choosing. This can be anything from a passion project to a work-related communication (appropriately anonymized). Each week, assignments build toward the final deliverable, allowing you to make steady progress with ongoing feedback—increasing the chances of success.
Take, for example, the following slide, which is representative of the sorts of projects attendees chose to work on throughout the course. (We’ve anonymized some of the details for confidentiality.) For context, the visual came from an analyst at a large organization that recently conducted an advertising test to drive incremental orders. This was what one of their team members had compiled to show the results.
This slide was not driving the intended action that the creator had hoped for. Below, I share how the process we teach in the course was used to improve the effectiveness of this communication.
WEEK 1: THE ART OF FEEDBACK
The first topic in our course is “feedback,” because of its vital role in learning and skill development. We spend time understanding who and how to ask for useful input, practice giving thoughtful feedback to others, and start to see the value of developing a critical eye to improve our own work. Giving and receiving feedback is a big part of participating in the course itself.
Considering the advertising example above, we could tell our colleague that we appreciate the text and red boxes that emphasize what they wanted to highlight. Then, we could ask them if they considered visualizing some of the data, rather than showing everything in a table.
WEEK 2: GRAPHS
While suggesting visualizing the data is a good idea, it can be a daunting task for some, because there are many different types of graphs. In the second week of the course, we explore visuals. We focus mainly on those that are popular in business settings, but also offer avenues to learn about others that are less prevalent.
For example, below are several ways to highlight the increase in new customers during the advertising test.
WEEK 3: AUDIENCE & MESSAGE
We take a step back from graphs in the third week to assess the context of our communication. Specifically: who is our audience, and what do we need them to do? We learn about and practice identifying a specific audience, understanding their needs, and thoughtfully crafting our message.
In the advertising test scenario, our audience is a single person: the marketing manager. The big idea we want to communicate is: The aggressive ad spend test increased orders but at a markedly higher customer acquisition cost, so we recommend pausing to refine our targeting strategy for more efficient growth before resuming investment.
WEEK 4: LOW-TECH PLANNING
Halfway through the course, we introduce one of our favorite low-tech planning processes: storyboarding. Students develop, share, and get feedback on their storyboard for their course project from classmates in a small group setting. In our previous cohorts, this has often been a favorite exercise—participants begin to crystallize their thinking and hear reactions from an unfamiliar audience.
With our audience and message in mind, an initial storyboard for the advertising example first explains the test design and results, then offers a recommended next step.
WEEK 5: VISUAL DESIGN
We turn our attention back to graphs in the fifth week of the course, in which we learn how to take our visuals to the next level with the simple—yet powerful—design tactics.
After applying declutter and focus techniques, the original busy data table for the ad spend test is transformed into something more straightforward, giving us the opportunity to indicate where we want our audience to look.
WEEK 6: STORY
In week 6, we explore how to use concepts of storytelling for communicating effectively with data. Participants get an opportunity to apply these concepts as they iterate and get feedback on their storyboards.
Reconsidering our audience and the tension in our ad spend story, the original storyboard is rearranged into a narrative arc (visually represented below) that prioritizes the needs and interests of the audience.
WEEK 7: PRESENTATION PLANNING
During our penultimate week, we focus on building out the overall structure of the final presentation—bringing the low-tech strategies we’ve explored during the course to life using slideware applications.
Sticking with the corporate brand template and applying active takeaway slide titles, a digital skeleton for the ad test presentation starts to take shape.
WEEK 8: PRESENTING DATA STORIES
In our final week of the course, our primary focus is on you. As the narrator, you play a critical role in ensuring that the data stories that you build are communicated effectively and persuasively.
After refining the slide content and practicing the delivery, the final presentation for the ad spend results comes together. Here are the final slides and corresponding talking points:
“Hi everyone. Thanks for joining me today. The goal of the call is to discuss the findings from our recent ad test and use the results to inform our marketing strategy going forward.”
“Quick reminder: this is the question we set out to answer in the test: will higher ad spend yield more orders and acquire new customers?
The short answer is yes, we can get more orders, but this might not be our best approach to acquisition and growth. Let me explain…”
“Our test was aggressive—we spent 4x the baseline (pre-period) amount to assess the impact on orders compared to the prior period.”
“Let’s look at the order impact now.
We’ll consider three two-week periods here on the horizontal x-axis—the baseline period from March 22 to April 4 before the spending increase, compared to two testing periods (two weeks each) which had the increased investment.”
“For context, the baseline orders were 439. This is pretty consistent with prior weeks and the same period in prior years. For the test to be successful, we should see higher orders during the two testing periods…”
“...and we did see an 8% increase. This is a modest increase and lower than we hoped for, given the investment.
Despite this, there was an interesting finding when we looked at the type of customers. I’ll now break down each of these bars by new and existing customers.”
“To show this, I am going to switch to look at the percent of total orders in a 100% stacked bar chart.”
“As I layer on the data, we do see the mix of new customers was higher during the testing periods (almost double), which is great news!
However, it came at an added expense, and we saw our customer acquisition cost, or CAC, markedly increase during the testing period.”
“For context, we went from a CAC of $1.1K in the prior period up to…”
“....$2.2K during the testing periods. More new customers are great, but at double the cost?”
“So, to answer the original question: yes, more spending drives orders and brings new customers, but it drives up the CAC substantially. Therefore, we don’t think it's an efficient use of our marketing dollars. Instead, we recommend...”
“Pausing tests for now and developing better targeting strategies to more efficiently attract new customers.
Let’s discuss.”
Below, on the right, is a send-around summary slide of the ad spend story—check out the difference from the original!
Would you like the satisfaction of your own presentation transformation? We have a few remaining spots in our final cohort of 2025—starting on September 15. This is your opportunity to give yourself the time and space to develop your skills further and put them into practice.
Register for our upcoming 8-week online course by August 22, 2025 and enjoy an exclusive 25% discount. Spots are limited—secure your place today and don’t miss out!
2025-08-04 22:29:00
We’re now less than two months away from the release of our upcoming book storytelling with data: before & after, and the whole team is getting excited. We’ve already shared three sample chapters with you, which you can still download here if you haven’t had the chance yet.
As you might guess, putting together a book like this means sorting through dozens of potential examples to include. In some ways, you could think of the final set as our 20 favorites…but that’s not exactly how it worked. We had to be more strategic—showing a range of use cases, pulling examples from different industries, and making sure we featured a variety of graph types across the solutions. It wasn’t just a popularity contest.
If it had been a popularity contest, though, the makeover I’m about to share would’ve made the list for sure. It’s one of my all-time favorites from a client engagement a few years back. To share it here, I’ve anonymized the details—updated the years and made a few subtle changes to the specifics.
In this case, our client was responsible for forecasting imports and exports from a specific country over a 15-year window. No small task—it involved a ton of variables. They often ran multiple models to account for different scenarios. But after they landed on a forecast, something big happened: regime change. A surprise election result put an unexpected leader in power.
That possibility hadn’t been factored into any of the original models, so they had to rerun them. The presentation we helped with was the one where they revealed the updated forecasts, and how they differed from their pre-election baseline (PEB) models.
Here is the original slide that the client used to reveal these updated forecasts.
There’s a lot going on in this slide. It’s trying to cover lots of information all at once. As a viewer, I’m not sure where to look first, or where to find the key takeaways. There are a lot of words on the slide, which can be helpful if I’m reading it on my own, but not ideal when it’s being presented live (which this one was).
On top of the words, there are acronyms and abbreviations describing the various models. All of the 15 different data series (yes, I counted them) are labeled with a mix of colors, data markers, and hard-to-decipher labels.
Many of these data series overlap one another in the graph itself, making it even harder to tell them apart. The legend doesn’t help much—it’s just one long list, without even a clear separation between “export” models and “import” models.
The good news is that all of this is fixable. And each of the following changes—on its own or combined—would make the visual stronger:
Use fewer words, and do so more intentionally
Simplify the legend
Show fewer data series at one time
Add clear takeaways
Use color to direct focus
We can make all of these changes (and did; you’ll see that below). But the single biggest improvement is making sure we tell a strong, coherent story.
This visual is trying to communicate something dense and nuanced, but important. If it’s explained clearly and thoughtfully, people will follow along. The best way to do this is the same way you start a journey of 1000 miles: one step at a time.
One of the most common traps in data visualization is trying to show everything at once. Especially when presenting live, it’s much more effective to reveal one idea at a time. Let each visual carry one part of the story. Then, build on that idea with the next slide or graph. Layer by layer, you’ll add meaning and clarity. And by the end, your audience will walk away informed, confident, and ready to take action.
When planning out a narrative, we often use a story mountain structure, composed of three elements.
We begin with the plot, where we describe the context and what’s at stake; we follow up next with the twists, which are the interesting things we found during our exploratory analysis; and then conclude with the ending, which is our recommendation for what to do (or discuss doing) next. You can explore this idea more fully in the article linked above, or in any of the books in the SWD library (including before & after).
For this communication, here’s how I’d apply the story mountain:
The plot – Country A’s trade value is going to change in the next 15 years. Because of the unexpected regime change, we think it’ll be worse than we previously expected (and we can set that expectation for our audience, who may not take that as a given).
The twists – Although the new models are overall more pessimistic than the prior ones, some do offer a bit more optimism, and these are predicated on certain developmental outcomes or efforts.
The ending – If we invest with an eye towards helping Country A achieve these specific outcomes, while also investing in opportunities that will benefit from these developments, we will realize the most impact from our investments.
For the remainder of this article, imagine that I’m delivering this presentation in person to a live audience. I’ll show the slides along with the narration I would use for each one.
“Folks, thanks for joining me today. Post regime change, we’ve had to revise our 15-year export and import projections for Country A. I’m going to say right off the bat that most of our models have revised their forecasts downward…but not all. There’s always uncertainty in forecasting, and there’s a range of possible outcomes that our models have generated, and we think there are still investment opportunities here.
“I’m now going to walk you through what we’ve found, and highlight why there is some reason for optimism.”
“Let’s start by looking at exports. For the latter half of the 2010s, exports were in decline.”
“They recovered slightly over the past four years, and last year sat at $52 billion US. “
“Our pre-election baseline model, or PEB model, forecast slow, continual decline, with an aggregation across multiple models showing $17 billion in annual exports by 2040. Of course, when regime change caused us to re-evaluate, we got a range of new forecasts.”
“This gray shaded region shows the range of our revised models, from most optimistic to most pessimistic. Leaving the PEB in as a reference, our new models are mostly lower than that base for the next 15 years. In 2040 the range of predictions is from $11 billion on the low end to $20 billion on the high end.
“That is, with one exception.
“We ran a model called 29P.”
“This model assumes 100% truck connectivity to the national IT infrastructure, electronic tolling, rolling high-speed weigh-ins, and so on. Now we don’t expect this to happen until…”
“...around 2035, but by 2036, that would already boost our expectations to above PEB projections. In fact, this one model expects such gains in exports, if we do achieve 100% connectivity, that…”
“...all on its own, it boosts the most optimistic models for 2040 by $7 billion, to a possible max of $27 billion in annual exports. No matter what else happens, this one development would make a substantial difference to Country A’s future export volume.”
“Now let’s switch our focus, and look at imports. We can see that even though…”
“...they were uneven through the last several years, sitting at $40 billion as of the end of ‘24, our PEB projections…”
“...expected imports to rise steadily, and reach nearly $100 billion by 2040.”
“Perhaps unsurprisingly, our revised models are uncertain, but mostly lower than the PEB, with a $32 billion range opening up by 2040.
“However, three distinct models offer us some optimism for how actual imports by 2040 could wind up as close to the top of that range as possible.”
“The first model is called A5CP. It tells us that with automated management of trucks once they’re in ports (RFID tags, using optical scanners, and so on), we could mostly exceed our pre-regime change baseline. You’ll notice a bit of diminishing return 15 years out, but this would keep imports on the higher end of projections near-and medium term.”
“Let’s look at another model. This one, SSVSIZE, is all about vessel and shipment sizes. While larger vessels and larger shipment sizes will take a few years to implement, we can see the positive effects compared to the PEB case by the middle of next decade, and the projections are for an increase to more than $100 billion in imports annually by 2040 if this comes to pass.”
“One last one to consider here: free trade agreements. Negotiated agreements have the potential to drive the trade value of Country A imports to the height of our projection range.
“With those four critical projections in mind, you can see that there are investment opportunities despite the recent unexpected regime change.”
“Let’s discuss what specific opportunities we can pursue that support the development of these infrastructure improvements, as well as others that will benefit from that development in a 10–15 year time horizon.”
The narrative tells a much clearer story now, don’t you think? By walking through a complex idea one step at a time, we give people the chance to build their understanding gradually. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, they’re more likely to feel informed and inspired.
If you ever find yourself in a situation where you can’t present these findings live, we recommend not sending the full slide deck around (and definitely don’t just send that first slide). Instead, use the same principles you used to build the full story, but apply them to a one-page executive summary. Help your audience see the plot (the context and what’s at stake), the twists (what your analysis uncovered), and the ending (what should happen now) in a condensed but clear format.
The slide below shows one way to approach this:
If you look carefully, you’ll see how you can get all the pieces of the story mountain in there.
Start with your key takeaway as the slide title.
Follow that with the context (your plot) in the short paragraph right below.
Condense your visuals from several animated steps into two clear, focused charts that highlight your most important findings (the twists). Use direct text annotations to explain what the visuals show, and tie everything together with color to guide the eye.
Finally, close with a bold takeaway (the ending) at the bottom: here’s what we should do next.
Visual makeovers like this one are a core part of the workshops we deliver to clients. It’s always fun to watch something go from standard to stellar—especially when it’s a graph or a slide you work with every day. Most of the changes don’t even take a ton of effort. We focus on giving people simple tools and practical tactics to improve how they communicate, without needing to be a technical expert or have a design degree.
If you enjoyed this makeover—which, let me remind you, didn’t make it into the book—just imagine how much you’ll enjoy the ones that did. storytelling with data: before & after comes out in the U.S. on September 23rd. You can pre-order it now from your favorite bookseller, or download three free sample chapters right away.
And if you or your team are curious how this kind of visual transformation could apply to your own work, let’s talk about setting up a custom workshop.
2025-07-21 21:30:30
Long before I joined storytelling with data as an employee, I was a fan. Back then, in 2016, I was an analyst, and I discovered a book that would change the way I thought about my work: storytelling with data: a data visualization guide for business professionals. (Or, as we have come to call it within the company: “the white book”.)
I loved how practical it was, especially Chapter 9, "Case Studies." There was something magical about seeing the strategies described throughout the book applied to real business examples. Comparing the before and after views brought home for me just how dramatically visuals could be improved through simple, common-sense modifications.
After reading the book, I started following the blog, specifically for the makeover articles. Despite each transformation being rooted in the same core principles, each scenario felt fresh. There was always a unique challenge to consider: comparing data series with extremely different magnitudes; dealing with a large number of categories; or navigating a less-than-ideal brand color palette.
This is what I love most about data visualization and storytelling. It’s never the same! Every dataset and audience presents a different set of constraints to solve.
Since joining the company in 2019, we’ve added three (soon to be four) new books to the SWD library. Let’s Practice! (“the blue book”) is a workbook featuring hundreds of exercises to hone specific skills like choosing the right graph type and decluttering charts. In 2023, “the yellow book”, storytelling with you, was published as a guide for public speaking so that anyone—data professional or not—could learn to deliver better presentations. And last year, we ventured into the children’s space with Daphne Draws Data, showing kids that math and data can be fun! This year, we are returning to adults with “the teal book”.
Reflecting on my journey creates a "pinch-me moment". It’s hard for me to grasp that I’ve gone from reader and fan, to employee, to author of the latest addition to the SWD library, storytelling with data: before & after. I wrote this book alongside my colleague and friend, Mike Cisneros, and, of course, our CEO and Founder, Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic. As a team, we’ve helped clients refine hundreds of real-world communications over the years. From those experiences, we’ve put together 20 case studies for before & after, sharing the process and lessons learned while we transformed their examples, all of which were carefully anonymized to protect confidentiality.
Because these case studies represent real client work we've done across various industries, the examples vary significantly. We show makeovers for ad hoc graphs, emails, dashboards, scorecards, reports, executive summaries, and even entire slide decks. There are qualitative datasets, maps, violin charts, survival curves, and, of course, the standard lines, bars, and pies.
Source: Knaflic, Cisneros, Velez. storytelling with data: before & after, Wiley, © 2025.
This is the book I wish I had when I was an analyst (before my time at storytelling with data). I can’t tell you how many times I searched online for inspiration or good examples of business graphs and slides that I could emulate. Most of the results were disappointing and could be grouped into two categories:
Overly colorful and dense visuals (a.k.a. bad examples), or
Diagrams and dashboards packed with circles. (Why are there always so many circles? Also, dashboards aren’t great tools for storytelling!)
I hope that storytelling with data: before & after will become a reliable reference and inspiration for others. But beyond that, I hope that with each makeover, readers will learn something new that they can apply well beyond the example.
From the folks who attend our workshops, to readers of our blog and earlier books, to viewers of our instructional videos, everyone unanimously agrees that they love the before-and-after visual transformations we create. We get it—we love to watch makeovers, too!
That’s why twenty of the twenty-two chapters are makeovers, each one illustrating a particular theme or constraint our clients faced.
For example, Mike worked with a client who struggled to find the right level of detail to share in their graphs. This client collected real-time data to monitor their call center, using graphs that resemble the following.
Source: Knaflic, Cisneros, Velez. storytelling with data: before & after, Wiley, © 2025.
Mike helped them understand that while high-frequency data is great when monitoring performance, it’s often too detailed to use in a presentation or report. For example, when providing an update on an outage in the call center, the data needed to be grouped into 10-minute intervals and broken down by day of the week (shown below). Throughout the chapter, he cycles through even more ways to aggregate the data depending on the message.
Source: Knaflic, Cisneros, Velez. storytelling with data: before & after, Wiley, © 2025.
By the way, if you want to explore this makeover in more detail, download our sample pack. It’s free!
While I think the examples themselves are powerful, I’m also quite proud of the way the book’s visual aesthetic came together.
As you scanned some of the spreads shown throughout this article, you may have taken notice of the bold but clean designs. We worked hand-in-hand with our design team at Flight to make this book both accessible and visually interesting.
The final spread of each makeover chapter features a before-and-after comparison, along with a summary of the steps and lessons that made the transformation possible. Our goal for you, the reader, was to make it easy to quickly reference strategies as you apply the learnings to your own projects.
Source: Knaflic, Cisneros, Velez. storytelling with data: before & after, Wiley, © 2025.
Throughout the book, we’ve added QR codes. These lead to video tutorials that demonstrate how to create specific charts, such as dot plots, or add animation to your charts in PowerPoint. For a handful of the presentation slide makeovers, we created video companions so you can not only read about how we redesigned the deck, but also watch the final presentation.
Source: Knaflic, Cisneros, Velez. storytelling with data: before & after, Wiley, © 2025.
I can only hope you’re just as excited about before & after as we are. The book will be available this September (available for preorder now). In the meantime, we’ve got you covered with some sneak preview content:
Watch Cole’s live presentation of her makeover in Chapter 20, where she transforms a colorful dashboard into a detailed presentation that drives action.
Download a free sample of the book featuring three chapters: the introduction, my first makeover in the book (Chapter 1), and Mike’s call center scenario shared above (Chapter 17).
Here’s to your next data makeover, whether it's a work-related visual, something prompted by our community site, or just a personal project. I hope you enjoy the process—there’s also something new to learn!
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2025-07-03 21:00:00
There’s something truly magical about being together in a room—learning, talking, and building skills in person. I was reminded of this recently while delivering a two-day workshop in Trinidad—a unique opportunity to visit a country I hadn’t been to before, which stood out personally, for the wonderful experience, and professionally, for how smoothly everything came together.
This workshop had attendees from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and more than ten separate entities of invited government stakeholders. As I flew back to London, I reflected on the numerous unique and considerate touches the organizers put in place that contributed to its success and helped make this workshop an occasion that will live long in the memory.
Pre-workshop engagement and set up
Any successful gathering of people requires a lot of motivation and preparation ahead of time—effort that often goes unrecognized. I had high hopes for this workshop, because the communication leading up to the day was outstanding. I had regular email exchanges and a Zoom meeting with the IDB team to align on goals, expectations, and logistics—not just around the content, but the practicalities of traveling to another country with hotel recommendations, local areas to explore, tips on currency, food and transport all provided. The attendee list was shared and discussed ahead of time. That early investment paid off. I felt at ease, well-informed, and excited to deliver.
No matter how well prepared one might be, there’s nothing to reduce those pre-workshop butterflies like walking into a venue and seeing everything laid out and ready to go. Every seat was set with a handout, pens, sticky notes, and a copy of storytelling with you.
That sense of calm before the session starts makes a huge difference—and the positive atmosphere continued as attendees arrived and began socializing over a catered breakfast.
During the workshop
The workshop began with an IDB-led introduction, emphasizing the shared objectives for participants and included an amusing roll call of representatives present in the room. It reinforced the shared purpose and created an inclusive tone from the outset. As a result, interaction was high—not just during the dedicated Q&A sections, but throughout. I love it when workshops take on that conversational tone. It helps everyone relax, encourages deeper learning, and often surfaces insights and discussion topics that enhance the overall session.
One activity that best demonstrated the enhanced interaction of the workshop was the storyboarding exercise. Participants typically work independently, brainstorming ideas on a project of their choosing. But with this group, several tables opted to work collaboratively on a sole tablemate’s chosen topic. It sparked lively discussion and turned the exercise into one of the most effective I’ve seen.
On day one, we spent time looking at the power of leveraging aspects of story, a critical aspect to delivering a compelling communication. During this lesson, we give one lucky participant a chance to take away our latest book, Daphne Draws Data. To ensure fairness, rather than simply handing the book to the highest hand raiser, the IDB team chose to begin day two with a quiz. This quiz, composed by the IDB team, focused on lessons from day one and served as a great introduction and recap to day two, as well as a casual, fun way to begin the day.
And, my personal highlight of the workshop. Following a conversation about local cuisine on the second day, the team surprised me during a break with a traditional Trinidadian dish—Doubles, a common street food treat consisting of curried chickpeas served on two fried flatbreads. Cue laughter, a few photos, and a memory I’ll treasure.
The workshop concluded with a presentation of certificates by Julian Belgrave, IDB Country Representative in Trinidad and Tobago—turning the close into a moment of celebration. And, despite the 85°F heat (that’s hot for an Englishman!), we all ventured outdoors for a group photo, giving a graduation-style feel to proceedings.
While great content and quality delivery form the foundation of a stellar workshop, the magic often comes from the people, especially the care and attention given by those behind the scenes. This session was a standout example of that, and I want to say a huge thank you to Isaiah, Paula, Daniela and the rest of the team for helping to deliver and contributing to an unforgettable experience for all.
Here’s to more fantastic workshops—together, in person, and full of connection.
