In April 2025, I spent two half-days teaching a fuller Data Bootcamp for the Asian American Health Initiative in Maryland.

We went through the entire data analysis process together: data management, cleaning, tabulation, and visualization. And, we practiced in both Excel and Power BI.

In this 5-part series, you’ll learn some of the highlights from that two-day class.

What’s Inside

• Part 1: Text Editing in Excel
• Part 2: Birthdates into Age Ranges in Excel
• Part 3: Merging and Lookups
• Part 4: Excel Dashboards
• Part 5: Power BI Dashboards

Watch the 5-Part Series

Download the Excel File

It’s here: https://depictdatastudio.kit.com/products/mini-data-bootcamp

I spent a couple hours livestreaming, and created this masterpiece:

a slice-able Gantt chart that automatically updates and populates itself when you add more rows to your dataset (i.e., no tedious manual updates).

How to Make Slice-able Gantt Charts in Excel

You can watch the high-level tutorial here:

https://youtu.be/LXF2du3-W70

What’s Inside

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:08 The end product: Slice-able in Excel. or printed/PDFd
• 1:52 Gantt chart options in Excel: 1) Stacked bar chart or 2) Inside cells, like this
• 3:50 Dataset
• 5:51 Pivot table
• 6:29 Slicer
• 6:40 List of projects and their amounts
• 8:30 Helper cells to the left and above
• 9:55 AND formula to fill in the body of the table
• 11:18 Conditional formatting
• 12:50 Theme Colors
• 13:40 Your Homework List 41:17 Want more details? Watch the 2.5-hr livestream
• 14:37 Download this Gantt chart

Download the Excel File

It’s here.

Related Resources

• The full livestream where I created this from scratch
• Helper cells

I recently saw a graph that looked like this—accidentally combining 3 different units on the same chart:

In this 8-minute lesson, you’ll learn:

(1) how small multiples layouts can help, and

(2) how to make small multiples charts in Excel.

What’s Inside

• 0:00 My goal: Convince you to use MORE GRAPHS
• 0:32 The fictional example: 3 different variables/units
• 1:44 Before: Everything together in one graph
• 2:30 After: Small multiples
• 3:21 How to make small multiples line graphs in Excel
• 4:30 Use the “Select Data” menu to graph 1 variable/unit at a time
• 5:10 Copy-paste to make the additional graphs
• 6:24 Align and group the separate graphs together
• 6:55 1 lonely line? Try an area chart
• 7:30 What it would look like in Word
• 8:09 Recap of key points

Download the Excel File

It’s here.

How are you visualizing percent changes?

I recently saw a boring, black and white table as I was scrolling through LinkedIn.

The topic caught my attention—it was about Hispanic adults living with HIV—but the poorly-formatted table wasn’t making the patterns easy to understand.

I had a 30-minute window before I needed to pick up my kids from school, so I dove in!

In this 7-minute summary, you’ll learn:

1. bare-minimum edits for tables (alignment, decluttering, etc.);
2. a few different ideas for visualizing percent changes (checkboxes, slopes, deviation bars, icons); and
3. the winning design.

What’s Inside

• 0:00 Intro
• 0:18 The original table
• 1:06 Remaking the table with the same formatting
• 1:23 Gray horizontal lines
• 1:31 Left-aligned text
• 1:48 Trend lines
• 2:27 Percent changes with deviation bars
• 2:53 How-to tips in Excel (sparklines, data bars, IF statements)
• 3:28 Checkboxes to show increases or decreases
• 3:52 Adding state icons with the StateFace font
• 4:27 Adding arrow icons
• 4:54 Narrowing-down the best ideas
• 5:25 Re-sizing the columns
• 5:40  Not so Debbie-Downery

Download the Spreadsheet

It’s here.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to fix Excel charts that have too much empty space:

​What’s Inside

• 0:00 Intro
• 0:28 Lindsey’s question
• 0:54 Outside chart borders
• 1:19 Inside chart borders
• 1:56 Unsolicited dataviz editing
• 15:30 Before and after

Resources Mentioned

• Video about adjusting outside and inside chart border
• Video about color contrast testing