A Review of ‘Storytelling With Data’
Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic’s book is an accessible resource for data viz practitioners, clients, and everyone in between.
Three years ago, I was at a career crossroad. As a BI consultant, I had developed reports for different clients for a while. I always got rave reviews as a trainer while training staff on tools like Excel, SSRS, and Power BI, but started noticing that people still went back to their old ways once the training was over. As a developer (I could not dare call myself a designer then!), I was frustrated that, more often than not, my work was not adopted more widely. People were often only using these reports to extract data and not as information and decision tools.
I realized that while I was good at building reports, I needed resources to design something that would suit my audience’s expressed and unconscious needs, and lead to REAL adoption. I started digging for resources, and even went back to school! There, I had my real eye-opener during a dashboarding class: Good reports are not only technical products, but they delicately balance data, design, human cognition and computer science. I couldn’t master all that overnight, but I knew I had to get better at communicating with data if I were to see the value in my work.
