Data Visualisation and Storytelling Course

Data analysis and analytics. Uncover insights and transform your organisation.

If you want to learn how to better present your data and tell a compelling story with it, then this course is for you.

Companies and people spend huge amounts of time creating and then trying to share data. Being able to tell a story around your data is an important skill, providing insights and informing better decision-making.

In this course, you will learn about the seven principles of data visualisation and storytelling. This course is software agnostic, meaning that you can apply these techniques to data from any analytics tool. Then, whatever software you use to tell your story can be told more simply, understood more easily and used to greater effect.

As part of the course, please bring your own examples. This course is about design thinking and is not reliant on any pre-course knowledge, exposure to specialist data tools or programming language.

Aims

The course aims to work through and teach seven principles of data visualisation. We will then workshop your own examples and put your learning into practice.

Outcomes

By the end of this course, you should be able to:

• recount the seven principles of data visualisation
• apply the seven principles to a number of different settings
• practice the principles in a class environment
• look at any presentation of information or data, and interpret the common language to be able to critique and think about it.

Content

In this course, you will learn the seven principles of data visualisation:

• Trigger rapid processing
• Maximising data-ink ratio
• Providing focus
• Facilitating comparisons
• Maximising content
• Removing ambiguity
• Storytelling without deception

Intended audience

Anyone who looks at or prepares packs of information or presentations.

Prerequisites

None

Delivery mode

Face-to-face, presenter-taught course

Delivery style

• Mixed lecture style including Q&A, class discussion and example practice
• End of day activity where you can apply the learning to improve the impact on your own presentations

Before the course

This course is about design thinking and is not reliant on any pre-course knowledge or exposure to specialist data tools or programming language. As such, you don’t need to bring a laptop. However please bring along examples of your own data, e.g., reports that your organisation’s leadership team uses. If any information is commercially sensitive, dummy numbers can be used and/or identifying information removed.

Course format

In the normal course structure, we will:

1. explain the benefits of visualisation
2. provide you with a common language/vocabulary to discuss visualisation within your team
3. work through planned examples; and finally
4. apply the learnings in a facilitated free form sharing session. This is where you can work on your organisations visualisations and the facilitator can try to assist you.

Parts 1-3 will take anywhere between 3.5-4.5 hours and Part 4 is a free form session.

With Part 4 in mind, please send the facilitator examples of what you want to discuss in an order that it can potentially be used within the slides, or have it ready to put on screen for the final session. This is a public course, so you may wish to use dummy (albeit realistic) data in your presentation and bring printed examples that are stripped of any identifying branding etc.