* Jonathon Schwabish - Founder, PolicyViz

Watch a preview here: https://vimeo.com/tucanaglobal/jonschwabish

Everyone who works with data needs to communicate their findings, their analysis, and their conclusions. It could be in an internal briefing or memo, a management report, an annual report or a scientific article. But how do you present your data in a powerful way? How do you achieve the goal of your presentation? How do you tell a story with your data to convince your reader or your audience? Knowledge about effective data communication is essential. In this presentation, we explore how to expand the data visualization capacities of the Microsoft Excel software tool. Though there are more and more tools available to analyze and visualization data, Excel continues to be the leader in the field, used by millions around the world every day.

- Moving beyond the basics in Excel requires some knowledge of how the tool works.
- Data analysts will likely be familiar with using the basic drop-down menus in Excel, but there's more to learn!

This session will explore:

- How to move beyond Excel defaults.
- How to encode everything in your charts with data. No text boxes, or drawing lines, shapes, and other objects.

Key takeaways:

- How to use data to add annotation to charts in Excel, generally.
- To see how different Excel chart types can be used more flexibly.
- How to create a custom color palette in Excel.