Stop making random charts in Excel.
Instead, tell a story.
“SHIFT + CTRL + RIGHT -> Recommended Charts”
Just about anyone can make a chart in Excel.
Highlight the data, ask Excel to recommend a chart for you, and your work is done, right?
Wrong.
It’s time to stop creating random charts just because you can. Stop prioritizing variety over function. Stop filling space when you don’t know what else to visualize.
Quick visualizations have their purpose, but if you want to visualize data in a way that is more compelling, more effective, and in a way that actually creates actionable insights, there’s a better way.
Storytelling with Data
In this analysis, I used Excel to look at the average airline fare in the U.S. over the past 50 years. The data used was gathered from the Bureau of Labor Statistics query tool (source: https://beta.bls.gov/dataViewer/view/timeseries/CUSR0000SETG01).
A Basic Line Chart (no storytelling)
First, I used Excel to create a basic line chart that showed the U.S. annual average fare from 1964–2021. This was as simple as selecting the data, clicking “Recommended Charts” and selecting a line chart which Excel auto-populated.
The results are less than stellar. While adequate in a pinch, it’s certainly not anything to write home about.
A Better Way (with storytelling)
After looking at the line chart, I saw two trends I wanted to highlight. The first was the decline in fare price after The Great Recession (large reduced fare was observed in 2009), and the second was the huge reduction in fare during COVID-19 in 2020.
Because I wanted to highlight the declines in the fare prices, I created an additional column for “Unit Change” which was a calculation of the difference between one year and the year before it.
I put these into a baseline chart to better visualize the price change from year to year.
This was better, but there was still more cleaning up to do.
To draw the reader’s attention where I wanted it to go, I focused on reducing noise in the visualization. To do this, I…
- Got rid of the background grid lines
- Reduced the number x-tick labels (in this case the labels where years are displayed)
- Greyed out the bars I didn’t want to highlight
- Used the color red to highlight the declines in price
- Annotated two significant dips (The Great Recession and COVID-19)
- Used the title as an opportunity to explicitly tell the story.
Here’s the final result:
What do you think of the difference?
If you’re interested in learning more, I would highly recommend the book Storytelling with Data by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic in which the author discusses many of these concepts.
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Have additional thoughts, questions, or comments? Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I am always happy to chat :)
