Data Storytelling

Data is everywhere. While preparing it for business use, visualization and storytelling are key parts of any business communication today. From analysts to top management, everyone is dependent on data and analysis to inform their daily decisions. Well-designed and crafted data storytelling is a result of the effort made behind it. From data gathering to data communication and presentation, it is very important to handle the vast amount of data correctly. Professionals having business intelligence and business analytics skills need to communicate effectively, as it involves understanding the message and the audience, then crafting the right visuals to deliver insights to stakeholders. The goal of this workshop is to enable you to work with the available data and use it to communicate a story to an audience, with a focus on simplicity and ease of interpretation. This is accomplished through a mix of data preparation, storyboarding, visualization and storytelling theory, their practical application with best practices used in industries.

These are the key takeaways that participants will gain:

• Understanding the data from perspective of the business requirements Pre-processing and preparing data to make it clean
• How to choose charts and graphs for any problem statement Visual data designing, data exploration and insights Aligning the flow to have a streamline design for storytelling
• How to analyze the insights from a stakeholder’s point of view How to implement the best industry practices in storytelling
• How to apply the storytelling process to case studies or specific client scenarios
• Specifically working with healthcare datasets to enable the love
• Working with tools like tableau and using best practices to create dashboards and stories

MODULE 1: Fundamentals of Design Thinking

• How to approach a problem and create a story
• How to narrow down information from the vast collective

MODULE 2: Overview of the Four Keys to Data Storytelling Audience

• Hero of your data story
• Data
  • Know the context behind your data
  • Variable classification
  • Handle missing and outlier values
  • Sanity checks
  • Univariate and bivariate analysis
• Visuals
  • Perceptual issues with 3D charts
  • Tables versus Charts versus Single Mectrics
  • Chart selection: Choosing the right visual for the job
  • The Bar Chart and Stacked Bar Chart
  • The Pie Chart
  • The Line Chart and Dual Axis Line Chart
  • The Combo Chart and Pareto Chart
  • The Histogram
  • The Scatter Plot
• Narrative
  • A step-by-step data storytelling process
  • Turning facts into stories: The Power of Narrative

MODULE 3: Statistics Behind Good Storytelling

• Sample size and inference – Why is it important?
• Correlation and causation – Applied examples

MODULE 4: Industry Case Study Sharing

• Generic case studies

MODULE 5: Workshop – Team Activity

• Picking the right chart exercise
• Storytelling with datasets

Basics of Excel for Data Handling and Analysis

The objective of the workshop is to familiarize the participants with the fundamentals of how to manage, transform and analyze data using the various functions and the power of Microsoft Excel. Excel is a very widely used tool with many organizations and departments and being able to produce a quick analysis is an asset.

MODULE 0: Recap – Excel Sheets and Workbooks

MODULE 1: Pivot Table

• Creating Pivot Tables
• Sorting and Filtering Pivot Tables
• Formatting Pivot Tables
• Creating Pivot Charts

MODULE 2: Functions & Formulae

• IF and Related Functions
• Lookup and Reference Functions Power Functions, Statistical Functions, Math Functions
• Date and Time Functions Array Functions
• Text Functions

MODULE 3: Advanced Charts

• Creating Basic Charts
• Style Charts with Design Tabs
• Fine Tune Chart Elements

Practice Exercises

Basics of SQL

Along with Excel being a data source and tool to manipulate data, nowadays databases are becoming very popular and part of every organization. Hence, learning and knowing the basics of SQL (Structured Query Language) has become very important. This workshop takes you through the nuances and fundamentals of how SQL can be used with databases to ingest, manipulate and store data.

MODULE 1

• Basics of Databases and Tables
• Database and Table Designs
• Normal Forms
• Basics CRUD Operations on Tables
• Where, Having Clauses
• Joins (Inner/Outer)
• Aggregate Queries
• Sub-queries
• Basics of Stored Procedures
• Practice Exercises

Introduction to Data Warehousing

Now that we have covered the basics of databases and SQL, it is important to understand how an organization works on a larger scale. This workshop will take you through the basics of data warehousing and how organizations use warehouses for their data.

• What is data warehousing?
• Data Warehousing Architectures
• Facts and dimensions
• The ETL Process

Data Storytelling and Visualization using PowerBI (Part -1)

Participants will learn how powerful a tool like PowerBI can be to showcase data in a visually insightful manner. Participants will sign up for PowerBI Desktop and Service and be given a large data set for hands on trainings throughout the bootcamp. We will be walking through the analytics workflow with a real-world case study using PowerBI to build a dashboard to tell an insightful story.

Modules

Introduction to Power BI

PowerBI is a tool which is widely used for data visualizations, storytelling and analytics. This module takes you through the journey of how it all began and what constitutes analytics and business intelligence along with the strength of how PowerBI bridges the gap between users and business insights.

• A quick history of Business Intelligence and Analytics
• The development of Self-Service Business Intelligence
• Introducing the Power BI suite
• Power BI Service, Power BI desktop & Power BI Mobile
• Introduction to Data Sources
• What Data Sources can be used with PowerBI

Working with Data and defining a business case

Before using any tool for data visualization and analytics, it is important to be data literate, understand the nature of the data, what the data consists of and also defining the format of the data to make it suitable for analytics. Along with the above, we need to ensure that the business case is well defined. We will go through how the above can be ensured as part of this module.

• Understanding the data you import
• Understanding and defining the business problem
• Creating tables of data to use in PowerBI
• Ensuring the data format is useful for analytics

Understanding the Business Case

Defining the business case is important before taking up the rest of the course. In this section, we will look at what the business case has to say and what our end objective is for this course.

Power BI Desktop

This module introduces Microsoft PowerBI Desktop and how it can be used to make data ready for further visualization and analytics. Preparing the data is a pivotal part of any data analytics lifecycle.

• Introducing PowerBI Desktop
• Connecting to a data source
• Building a data model
• Setting the properties of data
• Loading Table Relationships
• Creating and Deleting Relationships
• Using Query Editor

Visualizations

In this module, we will first understand what are the different types of possible visualizations and the business insights that could potentially be obtained from each type of chart/graph. It is important to understand what each visualization signifies in order to make the right choice while building a report/dashboard.

• Overview of Visualizations
• Creating and working with Visualizations
• Creating a Bar Charts, Column Charts, Line Charts and other visualizations
• Understanding Focus Mode

Formatting a Visualization

Visualizations are as good as they are made to look. It is important to know how to format your visualizations to have them convey the right information to the stakeholders. In this module, we will cover the various formatting options available for different visualizations.

• Axes
• Data Labels, Titles & Data Colors
• Backgrounds and Borders
• Aligning visualizations
• What is the right size for a visualization?

Data Analytics Literacy

Numerous organizations and individuals today are embarking on the journey of digital and data transformation. The primary step to this process is data and analytics literacy, the ability to communicate, read and write about data in specific contexts. Furthermore, both individuals and organizations need to know how to access and assess data, find meaning and derive actionable business insights.

Individuals should be able to use data to influence their daily activities as well as big-picture decisions. It is critical for everyone to know how to do the above, not just the data analysts or the data scientists. Data Analytics Literacy is the enabler. Being data literate will allow an employee or individual to experiment with the data and uncover new insights and generate opportunities.

In addition, being data literate is a big part of data security and would reduce risks of data breaches and issues. Putting data to good use is the key for any business. Numerous tools are available in the market for data analytics and data exploration, but is the tool the solution to decisions? This seminar will help answer this question.

This seminar will touch upon the following points

• What Data Analytics Literacy is all about and its importance
• Fundamental elements of data sources and data collection
• How to ask questions from data
• Importance of data storytelling and visualization
• Interpreting and gathering insights from visualization
• Exploring business cases
• Logical and critical thinking to make data informed decisions
• Using data to see the future

Data Storytelling and Visualization using PowerBI (Part -2)

Participants will learn how powerful a tool like PowerBI can be to showcase data in a visually insightful manner. Participants will sign up for PowerBI Desktop and Service and be given a large data set for hands on trainings throughout the bootcamp. We will be walking through the analytics workflow with a real-world case study using PowerBI to build a dashboard to tell an insightful story.

Working with Filters

While working with data and visualizations, it is very important to be able to narrow down what you see to make information easier to decipher. Filtering is an operation which helps you do that. This section deals with all possible and right ways to apply filters to data.

• Creating a Slicer
• Understanding and using the visualization pane for filtering
• Creating Visual Field filters
• Creating Top N Filters
• Adding page level filters

Advanced Visualizations

There could be cases where users would require plotting multiple dimensions in a visualization. For such cases we would need to look towards more advanced visualizations. This module covers some of those visualizations and how one can choose the right visualization when needs to be plotted.

• Create Map Based Visualizations
• Create a Gauge and Tree Map Visualizations
• Importing Custom Visualizations
• How do you choose the right visualization?

Understanding Visual Interactions

For business users, different visualizations need to have a controlled behavior when certain actions are done on the report or other visualizations. This module walks through the different types of visual interactions available and used.

• Why are Visual Interactions used in PowerBI? Why are they useful?
• Types of Visual Interactions
• Using Visual Interactions across visualizations

Reports in PowerBI

In order to present our findings, we need to put everything together to form meaningful visualizations which can give us valid and important business insights. This section deals with how we can put various visualizations together to form a report.

• Creating a report
• Adding Multiple Pages to your Reports
• Building a narrative in your report
• Adding Shapes, Images & Text Boxes to reports

Q & A and Quick Insights

There are some additional features provided in PowerBI which can make the process of building a report faster. In this section we discuss some of these new features and how they can be used.

• Using Natural Language Queries to make Visualizations
• Create a Visual using Q&A
• Understanding and using Quick Insights

PowerBI Service and PowerBI Mobile

Once a report has been locally built, its important to make it available to other people and share it. Also, making it portable is one of the key factors of today. This section will deal with how reports can be made readily available to various users.

• Understanding PowerBI Service (Participants require a business account)
• Publishing reports to PowerBI Service
• Accessing and sharing reports
• Installing the PowerBI mobile app
• Exploring the features of the PowerBI mobile app

Create your report in one hour: Viz-a-thon

After going through how you can create a report on PowerBI utilizing the basic features and business knowledge, it’s time to put it to the test! Working through a business case, and working in groups, we will try to come up with an apt report from the data, working through the different options PowerBI gas to offer.

Each participant will be awarded a certificate of completion at the end of the bootcamp.