When asked to write a guest blog post for this month's focus on storytelling on the Tableau Public Blog, I spent some time reflecting: if I had just a single lesson to share, what's the #1 piece of advice I'd give in this space? I'd boil it down to three simple words: lead with story. The following is the guest post I authored.

A common challenge in storytelling with data is the following conundrum. When presenting content live, you want to be able to walk your audience through the story, focusing on just the relevant part of the visual. However, the version that gets circulated to your audience - as pre-read or takeaway, or for those who weren't able to attend the meeting - needs to be able to stand on its own without you, the presenter, there to walk the audience through it. In this post, we examine a strategy for dealing with this challenge.

This is a case where the story being told wasn't quite right, or at least wasn't exactly the story I would tell after looking at the data in a couple of different ways. Here, I'll walk you through my thought process and makeover.

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.