Slopegraphs can be useful to show comparisons between groups. For example, when reporting employee survey results, a slopegraph can be used to show a given team's feedback across survey categories compared to the overall company. Check out this post to see an example and read more about slopegraphs.

When it comes to slides that communicate data, I don't typically recommend anything other than a white background. That said, sometimes there are considerations outside of the ideal scenario for communicating with data. Check out this post to see what I did to visualize data on a dark background.

The Pew Research Center reports on some fascinating data. But I tend to be underwhelmed with the way they illustrate this data visually. In many cases, some relatively minor modifications would transform the graphs from "not horrible" to great. Check out this post for an example.

This is a rich dataset on 7th graders meeting fitness standards by race over time from kidsdata.org in terms of the number of facets one could focus on and the number of stories one could use it to illustrate. In this post, I look at some of these stories and how to make them visually clear.

This fall, I had the pleasure of teaching Intro to Information Visualization for MICA's MPS in Information Visualization. It was a 4-week course, where we explored some fundamentals of data visualization and storytelling as it relates to communicating effectively with data. One of the assignments was a visual makeover, where students were asked to select a less-than-stellar visualization from the media, identify the underlying story and create a new and improved visual using data together with narrative to tell an effective visual story. Check out this post to see some of the impressive before-and-afters!

Check out this post for my remake of a data visualization challenge I posted to my readers.

There should be logic in the order of your data. While I would say this recommendation is universally true, I'll focus in this post on a very specific example to illustrate the concept: leveraging order for categorical data in a horizontal bar chart. 

I often refer to my method of creating graphs as "brute force Excel," meaning that you can make almost anything work in Excel, but it sometimes means getting a little creative. The method described in this post can be considered a prime example of brute force Excel, where I walk through the steps for turning tabular data into a value plotted visually within a range.

See my makeovers for Naomi Robbins' Forbes blog 2012 makeover challenge. This post features two remakes, the first a pair of donuts and the second a big table of data.