Storytelling like a pro
1. Storytelling like a pro
Let’s build a dashboard and a data story based on what we’ve learned so far! In our workbook, we have several worksheets with visualizations, which we have prepared for this purpose: the map of Europe, a DNA chart with songs’ energy ranges per country, and a detailed sheet with the year and the song titles and their energy scores. The vertical line indicates the overall average, and the color coding compares the energy score versus the average. How do we assemble a dashboard? We make a dashboard by clicking here. Let’s call it “Eurovision dashboard”. We will expand it to automatic size for now. We will start by adding an image with the logo and selecting ‘Fit image’. Let’s add our visualizations to the dashboard by dragging them in. We will also drop some blank objects to add some lightness to the dashboard and place them between the charts. We can now hide all the sheets as we included everything in the dashboard. We can always jump back to the sheet by clicking on its go-to-sheet button. Let’s add some actions by opening the Dashboard and Actions menu. We add a highlighting action from the map, and the DNA chart with Song energy ranges onto all sheets, triggered by selecting. Let’s test it out. It correctly highlights the countries! We will add one more action; this time we will filter. Let’s use the map and the DNA chart to filter the detailed songs chart. Deselecting it will return the entire data, so we want to Show All Values. Let’s have a look. Clicking on Turkey, we successfully highlight and filter the songs. What happens if we deselect this country? We reset the dashboard to its original state. Just as intended! Our dashboard is set to an automatic size. How would it look if someone attempted to scale it to a mobile phone size? Hmm, quite a bad experience, isn’t it? We would need to seriously improve that layout for that purpose and resize our visualizations. Remember to consider it when designing your dashboards. For now, we will return to the automatic size. Let’s study our dashboard by clicking on, for example, Poland. Hmm, clearly not a leader in the energy department! How about Sweden? Sweden is on another spectrum! Let’s save that insight into a story! To create a story, we click here. We will call it “Eurovision insights” and increase the size to automatic. Let’s also remove the title. Now, we will drop the dashboard into the view. It still keeps the selection on Sweden. Let’s add a caption, “Sweden among the leaders in song energy”, and resize it to fit. To format the caption background, we go to Format and Story and select, for example, dark blue as navigation shading. Let’s make another story point, but first, we will duplicate this one to avoid losing this insight. By checking out Norway, Sweden’s neighboring country, we notice a much lower energy level, which is remarkable. Let’s rename the caption on this second point. Toggling between our story points, we see that they act as bookmarks to our actions and filters. The story is still an interactive dashboard; we can hover over to see the tooltip, or select a new country, for example, Iceland. Notice a small pop-up above the caption. We can click on this button and update our story point. We should probably also change the caption to reflect that, but we will leave it here. Time for you to practice this on your own during this last set of exercises!2. Let's practice!
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