Get really good at creating really great charts, really fast.

The Practical Charts course

“I’ve held senior business intelligence roles for two decades and am familiar with many data visualization training programs. Nick’s course is currently the best data visualization training in the world.  Despite having discussed and studied data visualization with many people over the years, it STILL left me with the feeling of having a reprogrammed brain.  I want to go back and redesign every chart that I've ever created.”

- Chris Weis, Product Manager - Data Visualization, Kaufman Hall

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Three ways to take Practical Charts:

Office hours sessions:

Everyone who is taking or has taken the Practical Charts course (whether on demand, live online, or in person) is eligible to attend semi-monthly live online Q&A sessions with Nick. See the schedule of upcoming office hours sessions.

About the Practical Charts course:

Designing good charts is surprisingly tricky…

• “Should I use a stacked bar chart or regular bar chart for this chart? Or a pie chart?”

• “Do I have to extend the scale in this chart to zero, or can I just show part of the scale?”

• “This outlier value is messing up my whole chart. What should I do?”

• “My readers are ignoring my charts. How can I make them more engaging?”

Tricky questions like these arise all the time when designing charts, even simple, “everyday” charts for reports and presentations. Unfortunately, however, chart creators often make these—and many other—chart design choices poorly, leaving readers confused, bored, unmoved or misled. Even major news media outlets, universities, and high-tech companies regularly publish charts that flop with audiences because of basic design problems.

What this course will teach you

Practical Charts equips participants with practical, hands-on guidelines for making all major chart design choices that arise when designing charts in real-world situations (choosing chart types, choosing colors, choosing scale ranges, etc.) and for avoiding dozens of common chart design mistakes. After taking this course, participants will be able to reliably create charts that are engaging, easy to read, compelling, and accurate. More importantly, they’ll be able to reliably design charts that get the job done, whether “the job” is to answer a question that the reader has asked, explain something to them, persuade them to take a particular action, or any other purpose that might prompt someone to create a chart in the first place.

Who should take this course?

Practical Charts is designed for those who regularly design graphs and tables for “everyday” reports and presentations. Participants typically include business intelligence professionals, data analysts, data scientists, statisticians, and software developers, as well as healthcare professionals, educators, policy analysts, marketers, human resource professionals, investment fund managers, researchers, sales professionals and journalists. They come from a wide variety of sectors, including high tech, banking, government, retail, healthcare, higher education, media, aerospace, pharmaceutical, energy, entertainment, and others.

Participants range from those with relatively little data visualization experience to seasoned data pros with decades of data wrangling experience. Participants don’t need to have any prior data visualization training, however, they should have a basic working knowledge of at least one data visualization software product, such as Microsoft Excel, Tableau Desktop, Google Sheets, Qlik Sense, JMP, or a similar tool.

Course outline

1. General chart formatting guidelines

Formatting guidelines that apply to all charts regardless of chart type (bar charts, line charts, pie charts, etc.) and how to avoid common chart formatting mistakes:

• Formatting gridlines, tick marks, axis lines, borders, and other “non-data” elements

• Formatting scales (categorical, quantitative, interval, time)

• Choosing colors

• Formatting legends/keys

• Formatting text, numbers, and dates

2. Choosing a chart type

The largest part of the course, with detailed information on 50 chart types that are commonly needed when making everyday charts, organized into ten groups:

• Line charts and other ways to show data over time

• Pie charts and other ways to show the breakdown of a total

• Strip plots and other ways to show how values are distributed across a range

• Scatter plots and other ways to show how variables relate to one another

• Maps

• Bar charts

• Tables

• Heatmaps and shape size charts

• Combo charts

• Chart types to use cautiously or avoid

3. Showing data with more than three variables

How to handle challenging but common situations in which the data to be visualized has a more complex structure.

4. Interactive filters and chart animation

Examples of the unobvious but significant challenges that these can create for readers, and suggestions for how to avoid using these features.

5. Making charts obvious

Techniques for making key messages and takeaways obvious, such as visually highlighting the most important part(s) of a chart, explicitly stating key insights and recommendations in chart callouts and titles, and adding comparison/reference values.

6. Making charts less boring

A summary of techniques from other parts of the course that make charts more interesting and engaging, as well as a list of common ways that chart creators often try to “spice up” their charts, but that end up making them harder to read, less obvious or more prone to misinterpretation.

7. What now?

Suggestions on how to continue learning and improving, as well as my take on some emerging technologies that may (or may not) change data visualization in the future.

Topics not covered

• This isn’t a graphic design course and it doesn’t cover “artistic” charts or infographics. The focus is on designing “functional” graphs and tables that can be read quickly and easily, are compelling, are unlikely to be misinterpreted, and that “get the job done”.

• This isn’t a software product training course. Participants should have a basic working knowledge of at least one data visualization software product (Excel, Tableau, Qlik, JMP, etc.). All charts shown in the course can be created in any major, modern software product, and none require advanced software product expertise or advanced software product features.

• This course doesn’t teach participants how to create highly specialized or scientific charts. Simple, familiar chart types are almost always the most effective choices for the everyday communication in most organizations.

• This course doesn’t cover dashboard design or using data visualization for data analysis (only charts for communicating data to others are covered). Please see the course information pages for Practical Dashboards and Graphs for Analysis, respectively, for training on those topics.

Workshop format

For live (online or in-person) workshops:

Practical Charts consists of engaging, interactive presentation segments that feature realistic data visualization challenges and solutions with ample time for questions and ad hoc discussions. Eight interactive activities provide many opportunities for discussion and hands-on practice. Guidelines are demonstrated, not just stated, so that participants understand not just what the guidelines are, but also why they result in charts that are clearer and more useful to audiences.

All participants are required to watch a 33-minute prerecorded video at their convenience anytime before the workshop begins.

Online workshops are delivered as four half-day live online sessions via an online meeting platform such as Zoom, Webex or Adobe Connect. No data visualization software is used by participants during the workshop. Chart design challenges are conducted using basic illustration software or PowerPoint.

On-site (in person) workshops are delivered as two full-day sessions in a training or conference room at the client’s location, or at an off-site venue that has been rented by the client. No computers or software are used by participants during in-person workshops (design challenges are conducted using flipchart paper and markers).

For Practical Charts On Demand:

The Practical Charts On Demand course consists of 6.5 hours of video organized into 44 easy-to-digest lessons, along with four offline exercises for a total course completion time of approximately 7.5 hours. Participants have access to regular, live, online office hours sessions.

Take-away materials

Each workshop participant receives copies of Nick Desbarats’ Practical Charts and More Practical Charts books, as well as a downloadable PDF “cheat sheet” of 30 key slides from the course.