Through virtual and in-person workshops around the globe, we have taught tens of thousands of people how to communicate effectively with data. This series captures some of the noteworthy questions we hear during those sessions—and our answers.

Your charts always look so clean and well designed. Which tool do you use to build them and what tools would you recommend?

Although my colleagues and I have used a wide range of tools before, and during, our time at storytelling with data, we most often use Excel and/or PowerPoint for our client work, leveraging the latter to pull our workshop presentations together.

In some ways, the choice of which tool to use has already been made for us: Excel is simply so ubiquitous in business today, chances are high that our SWD audiences have at least some experience with it. But Excel has a few other things going for it besides “everyone already has it:”

Community - There are online Excel blogs, tutorials, videos, and courses available to suit all levels of proficiency. Very rarely is there a question or challenge that can’t be solved by searching the internet. Indeed, our own community has provided a number of resources.
Flexibility - Most common chart types are easily built in Excel. With a little creativity (and, on occasion, brute force techniques), you can bend Excel to your will in terms of formatting.
Simplicity - Our goal is to communicate effectively with our audience ,and often this requires our visualisations to be simple. Excel allows this. It shows that good stories can be told using available tools.

Does that mean YOU have to use Excel? Of course not. There are many different options for visualising your data, as folks in our community have demonstrated. We’ve seen excercises and challenges built in Excel, Tableau, PowerBI, Flourish, D3, R, and loads of other applications. Any or all of these tools, in certain scenarios, might work best for you; the only way to know for sure is to give them a try. It’s important to not let unfamiliarity with a tool (or a blind devotion to one) become a limiting factor when it comes to communicating effectively with data.

There’s no wrong way to start experimenting with visualization software. Some folks find courses and tutorials are a good way to explore and understand the basics; others feel there is no better substitute to properly learning a tool than diving in and getting “hands-on,” experiencing the struggle to achieve an end result, and feeling the satisfaction of accomplishment on their own.

While we can’t offer any blanket recommendations when an organization is looking into acquiring or upgrading their visualization tools, we do suggest asking a few questions to help decision makers in that process:

Does the tool provide the chart and graph types to meet the business needs and show the right types of analysis?
Does the tool have the capacity to store and analyze the volume of data your organisation possesses?
Do reports need to be automated or consumed in a self serve way?
What is the learning curve for the tool? How easy are the tools to use both from the perspective of the creator to build and the audience to understand?
What is our appetite for the logistics of acquiring and implementing this tool, in terms of cost, ease of integration, and maintenance?

Curious about what is possible to accomplish in various visualization packages? Check out these additional resources to see what our SWD community members have created:

SWDchallenge: try a new tool
Use the “search and filter” function for solutions in a specific tool: SWDcommunity