Word clouds created a bit of buzz when they first became popular. However, I often find that upon further evaluation they tend to be a letdown—full of fluff without so much informative value. Check out this post for my discussion on why and a word cloud makeover.

While it's easy to put your data into a chart and feel like you're done, this is a disservice to both your mission and your data. Here, I focus on an example from a recent workshop and discuss teasing the story out of the data, using data labels to help draw our audience's attention to where we want it.