Maybe you’re already familiar with dot plots…

Maybe you’re already using them…

Maybe you can make ’em in your sleep…

Or maybe you have no idea what I’m even talking about! (If that’s the case, stick around! This video is for you.)

You’ll learn about the differences between clustered bar charts and dot plots. Then, you’ll see a real-life example so you can start thinking about how you’d apply these in your own workplace.

Transcript

Ann K. Emery: [00:00:00] Maybe you’re already familiar with dot plots. Maybe you’re already using them. Maybe you can make them in your sleep.

Or maybe you have no idea what I’m even talking about! If that’s the case, stick around. This video is for you.

You’re going to learn about the differences between clustered bar charts and dot plots.

And then I’ll show you a real life example. So you can start thinking about how you might apply this chart type to your own workplace.

I’m Ann Emery. You’re watching Dataviz on the Go, the series where I make quick tutorials as I’m racing around between workshops and webinars and conferences and consulting projects.

And speaking of consulting projects, I was recently in a meeting with a client and they were asking about these chart types, clustered bar charts and dumbbell dot plots.

And right away when you look at them, they’re obviously different! One’s got bars, one’s got dots, but there is a slight, smaller nuance that I want to draw your attention to here. [00:01:00] And that’s related to attention!

It’s related to where our eyes and brains, and therefore where our precious attention, goes when we look at each of these graphs.

So when you look at a bar chart, your eyes are going to look at obviously the end point, right? That’s the really juicy part of the bar chart.

With dot plots, they don’t waste any time. They cut right to the chase. I love them for their brevity and they just plot the end point. Okay, they don’t waste our ink and waste our time with all this, all this unnecessary ink.

Another slight difference is when you want to compare the end points, you have to do a little bit of a diagonally down movement to compare them, where dot plots plot everything on the same plane, so that it’s just a little bit faster, right?

Instead of stacked endpoints, it’s side by side: same line, same plane.

Alright, let’s look at a real life example because [00:02:00] this one with A, B, C, D and group one and group two is obviously super made up!

Let’s go back into the vault in my memory, where about 15 years ago, which is a million years ago, I was working on a lot of school climate surveys.

I did a lot of consulting for the U S Department of Education. I looked at test scores, all sorts of academic performance and school climate surveys, and I don’t remember the exact details of how this was measured, but I do know that we surveyed parents. And school staff, like the teachers and the principals and all the administrative staff. And then we compared how they responded on different measures.

This is the default graph that Excel is going to give you, which of course, if you’ve watched any of my other YouTube tutorials or read any of my blog posts over the years, you know, we can’t keep that. Okay. Let me just let, you know, just make it super duper clear what we’re not doing.

We’re not keeping these default, inaccessible settings. At a bare minimum, we’re going [00:03:00] to add Big A Accessibility –508 compliance and ADA compliance. That’s the usual stuff. That’s like making sure the font is big enough and dark enough, removing the legend and adding the direct labels right here, which is a win for grayscale printing and for custom words. Colorblindness.

And then we might even, I hope, I hope you do this. I hope you keep going with “little a accessibility” edits to make sure that your graph is really intuitive.

That’s going to be things like grouping, right? Finding groups of elements where parents scored the school higher, versus staff.

That’s going to be things like adding annotations, which, guess what? That’s just a good old text box. It’s a call- out box to help people figure out what the patterns are so that they’re not just guessing and searching and hunting for any type of insight.

This one, honestly, when it’s Big A and little a accessible, I’d say [00:04:00] it’s not that bad!

I wouldn’t lose sleep over this.

If you go this far with editing with your clustered bar charts, I’m going to say: virtual high five, leave it alone. You’ve graduated. No need to keep on going with editing unless you want to, unless you’re ready to really keep boosting your skills and try out something that’s a little bit more advanced.

And that advanced, uh, approach would be the dumbbell dot plot. Which as you know, only puts the emphasis on the end point, the juicy important part. And it helps draw your attention with this connecting line, the, the dumbbell part of it to the difference between the staff and the parents- or whatever groups you’re comparing in your project.

Now, you’re going to have to put the annotations on these finished charts in a little bit different spot, depending on whether you’re doing a landscape final project or a portrait final project.

So if this was going to be landscape, you’re going to have [00:05:00] space for the annotations off to the side. If it’s portrait, It’s going to be a lot narrower.

You’re just not going to have the space. So you’re probably going to have to put the call out boxes above each chart, something like this.

Here’s what I mean: landscape versus portrait. You’re just going to have to think very carefully about where everything fits. So it’s not so condensed that people can’t actually notice those important differences between your groups.

It’s your turn. Comment below this video. Let me know, are you using dot plots? For what? You probably aren’t doing school climate surveys. You’re probably using them for something completely different from this. And also let me know what types of how to questions you have. These are possible in good old Excel and PowerPoint and Word, but they require some advanced behind the scenes magic tricks to make them happen, which I am happy to share with you in future [00:06:00] videos.

Did you know… that Excel now has checkboxes?!?

In this video, you’ll learn:

• how to add checkboxes to your spreadsheet,
• how much better they look than the “old” way of doing it, and
• what types of details we can edit (like the checkbox size and color).

What’s Inside

• 0:00 Welcome
• 0:21 Dataviz On The Go
• 0:32 How to Add Checkboxes to Microsoft Excel
• 0:59 The Old Way: Adding Icons (Image Files) One by One, Not Clickable, Yuck
• 1:36 Another Old Way: Webdings g’s and c’s (Filled Squares and Empty Squares)
• 2:26 Your Editing Power: Delete, Size, Color, Use in Formulas (“true” = filled in, “false” = empty)
• 3:21 Conditional Color (e.g., everything is gray, turns green when filled in)
• 5:34 Colorblind-Friendly & Grayscale-Friendly, hooray!!
• 7:28 DON’T Transfer to Word/PowerPoint, darn. NO GRAINY SCREENSHOTS!!! Keep ’em in Excel and just PDF your Excel file directly.
• 8:32 Don’t Forget to Like, Subscribe, and Share

Resources Mentioned

Colorblindness simulation tool: https://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/

Transcript

Ann K. Emery: [00:00:00] So today I’m here with Do you want to say your name? This is Isla, and she just got home from kindergarten, and you want to make a video together?

Alright, we’re going to show you how to make checkboxes in Excel. They’re pretty new, so you might not have seen them before. Today is the day.

Isla, should we tell them that they’re watching Dataviz on the Go?

And we make YouTube videos for them? To help them with their job and help them save time. Yeah.

So let me show you how you make these because they’re pretty easy. So what you’re going to do is you click on the empty cell where you want to add them. And then you go to insert and they’re there. They’re right there.

So you click on the checkbox box. It adds an empty one and you just drag them down and then you fill them in. Look, when you click on the square, do you know what happens? You get a little check mark like that.

What I used to do [00:01:00] is you would click on the cell, you go to insert, you go to icons. Do you see the little duck I love right there?

And then you’d have to scroll through the whole menu. Uh, if it loads, right? And do you see all these pictures in here? And you could pick one like this that’s kind of similar, right? That one has a circle. And you could add it and you could, this is a new ish feature too, you could place it in the cell, which is kind of nice.

But then you can’t click on it, you know, you get the same end result, but you don’t have the process, the clickable process in it. So that’s all right. That’s kind of the old way.

Um, what I used to do is, Isla, do you know what letter this is? Do you recognize that one? It makes the guh sound. That’s a “g.” I used to do like this, and then do you know that one?

That’s a “c.” Yeah, we were looking, that makes a kuh sound, right, like cat? We were looking at that in your Bob books last night. Okay, what I used to do is I would do g’s and c’s, uh, G for good, [00:02:00] C for, for crappy. We probably shouldn’t say that word out loud though. Um, and then you change them to webdings, if I can type with one hand, webdings, and you sort of, sort of get the same appearance, right?

Do you see how that’s not quite a checkbox? It’s like a filled in square and an empty square. So it’s. Not, not quite as cute. Yeah, it doesn’t have a check. That’s why I like these. They look like checks.

I also like them because, look, you can delete them if you change your mind. You just hit the delete key on your keyboard.

And you can change the size. You can make them like hugely huge. Whoa, too big. Probably we just want them the same size as the font though.

You can change the color. What color should we pick? Like, purple? Green. Green. We can make them green.

And we can also count them up. How many checks are filled in right here? Two. Yeah, exactly. And let’s say you had a really long list and you didn’t want to count [00:03:00] them all because it would just take forever. You could do this formula. You could do COUNTIF. And you could say, I’m going to count this list and I’m going to count the trues. True means filled in, false means not filled in, right? And then you get two to save yourself a little bit of time, right? And make sure you don’t make typos.

I also really like these because they have not just regular color, but conditional color. Conditional color means, you know, you could make them all black, you could make them all green, you could make them all red. But let me, um, let me show you, let me copy and paste these, right? I’m gonna make them all red, right? They’re all just red font. And then I’m going to make it so that when the check is checked, they’re green, right?

Stoplight, red, green. Do you know when we’re driving and we see the stoplight on the street and it’s like, red means, [00:04:00] red means stop. Yeah, you’re right. Um, so red means like, whoa, caution, bad. Everybody kind of understands that in the data world too. Uh, let’s see. Conditional formatting here. Let’s go to. New rule, and let’s say a, which one do we want?

Format cells that contain. And we want it to be a specific text, and if it is a true, then we will set that one to Is it gonna load? Is it gonna load? Let’s try it again. Format. Uh, we want the font color to be green. Okay, so you Yeah, we made it all red, except if it’s checked, it’s green. And then click OK a couple times, and you get the stoplight coding, which is possible, but I think it looks really ugly.

I don’t know. I think that’s like too colorful almost. What do you think? It is Christmas colored, you’re [00:05:00] right. Um, you could also do, you could make it all gray, and that everything’s checked in, then is green. I like this one better, it’s not quite so busy. What do you think? With the gray? You like the first one better?

You like a lot of colors, right? Mommy more likes plain stuff, I guess. We could focus on the checks. We could also focus on the boxes. Which we would do that with, um, I can’t remember. It doesn’t matter. It would be the opposite of what we just did in conditional formatting.

Alright, um, and then another reason I like checkboxes like this is that they are colorblind friendly and they are grayscale friendly.

Even technically this one with reds and greens is colorblind friendly. Um, Isla, do you know what colorblind means? Have you heard of that before? No. I bet some kids in your class may be colorblind. It’s pretty common. It’s like, um, 1 in 12 boys, they don’t see red and [00:06:00] green. Did you know that? They see it as yellow.

I’m going to show you what it looks like if you were colorblind. I’m going to take a little picture of the screen and we’ll put it here. So people wouldn’t see my red and green. No, they wouldn’t see red and green. I’m going to show you what it would look like for maybe, maybe some of the boys in your class, since it’s pretty common.

Let’s go to color- blindness. com. We clicked on color tools, CVD simulator, and we’re going to choose that screenshot that I just put on the desktop. Here it is. Color blind test. And this is what it looks like for me and you, right? We can see like the Christmas colors right here. But if somebody had red green color blindness, they wouldn’t see red and green.

They would see a bunch of yellows. But even though this looks like a bunch of yellows, it’s okay, they can still see [00:07:00] the checks versus the empty. So, so we’re good. They can see, they can see like the, the colored in part, right? Which is nice. Or if you printed this out, does your teacher, your teacher has printouts and worksheets at school, right?

Um, your teacher, to save ink, might print in grayscale sometimes, and this is what it would look like in grayscale. So it’s super colorblind friendly and grayscale friendly. So it gets Ann Approval.

Alright, the only downside to checkboxes is they do not transfer well to Word or PowerPoint. Can you, you want to see what happens if you try to put them into this thing called Word, Isla?

It’s not, it’s not good. It’s not good. They are not gonna show up as well. They’re gonna look like, um, gonna look like much, they’re gonna look like funny little, like, machine rectangles. They are gonna look like, let’s grab, I don’t know, like this one? Let’s say you wanted to copy [00:08:00] it, and you wanted to paste it, and it just looks like trues and falses, which isn’t, that’s not good, right?

That doesn’t look like checkboxes. Or, if you, even if you paste special and you do, like, a picture, um, it just looks, it looks funny. That doesn’t look good, right? And it does the same thing in PowerPoint, it’s just not very good.

So these are really meant to live inside of Excel, okay? Or you can PDF your Excel screen, and then you can share the PDF with your audience that way.

What do you think about checkboxes? Good? Thumbs up?

Do you want to tell them, um, anything at the end of the video? If I can move the mic closer to you? What do you want to do?

All right. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and share! Bye!

You did great! What do you think of your first video? [00:09:00] Good.