News and Notes from PolicyViz - Issue #6

Formatting Long Labels in Excel

Have you ever created an Excel chart where the labels stretch out to infinity or are incomplete so you can’t read them? Last week, I wrote a short blog post and posted a video about how to remedy this issue. It's a relatively simple copy-and-paste-and-copy-and-paste again process between Excel and PowerPoint.

I was surprised by how many people reached out to me about what I thought is a pretty simple hack. I think the biggest thing for users is that this is just a simple feature that is just lacking in Excel. There are alignment buttons already! And we now have them for data labels, why can't they work for axis labels (or, for that matter, titles)?

Nolan Haims @NolanHaims

Not just a "little" hack. Can we get @jschwabish some sort of prize for this? https://t.co/98IsjfF5tI

Anyways, I'm not sure what prize there is for this hack, but I think it just goes to show what you might think as a relatively simple cheat or hack or technique may be just the thing that many need to help make their lives or work better.

I hope you'll like this week's content and check out all that's going on at PolicyViz.

Thanks,

Jon

Episode #206: Zen Faulkes

Zen Faulkes is a biologist who has studied and worked in Canada, Australia, and the United States. He is currently an instructor at McMaster University in Canada. He was an early adopter of science blogging, and began writing about conference posters in 2009. His first book, Better Posters, draws on over a decade of experience giving advice to poster makers. (And the poster blog still updates weekly.) He is @DoctorZen on Twitter, and his home page is DoctorZen.net.

What I'm Reading

A few things I'm reading (or should be reading!) and think would be good additions to your reading lists.

Books

• Atlas of the Invisible by James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti

• Making Sense of Field Research by Sheila Pontis

• Protecting Your Privacy in a Data-Driven World by Claire McKay Bowen

• Building PowerPoint Templates v2 by Echo Swinford and Julie Terberg

Research

• Clarity and Aesthetics in Visualization: Attention, Contrast, Grouping (blog post) from Enrico Bertini

• The Effect of Free School Meals on Household Food Purchases: Evidence from the Community Eligibility Provision (NBER Working Paper) from Michelle M. Marcus and Katherine G. Yewell

• Avoiding Ableist Language: Suggestions for Autism Researchers from Kristen Bottema-Beutel et al.

Tweets, Articles, and Data Visualizations

• Enrico Bertini on teaching and learning

• Where Should You Live? New York Times

Note: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

November Sale at the Shop!

Everything at the PolicyViz shop is being marked off by 20% for one more day! If you didn't get your fill of Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday, this is your last chance to get discounts on dataviz-related shirts, ebooks, masks, and more. Use the code "Holiday2021" to get the discount.

Check out the PolicyViz Data Visualization Catalog

Whether you know this by now or not, there is a wide array of graphs available to us when we communicate our data. We all know how to read line charts, bar charts, and pie charts–not because we are born with those skills but because we are taught how to read them as children and are exposed to them hundreds and hundreds of times. Learning which graphs work best for which audience is a key component of my data visualization classes and workshops (and my forthcoming book, Better Data Visualizations.)