Before Christmas I spent some time working with tables on a seven-country study, and going Grrr. It seems to me that the main purpose of tables is to provide the aggregated data that populates a visual report. I’d be interested…
All I want for Christmas is…better PowerPoint
It’s not asking much. I’d just like to be working with a data visualisation package (since that’s what the MR industry uses it for) that’s a bit fitter for purpose. And I do admit that PowerPoint 2013 is better than…
Visuals should come as standard
When I started in market research, the main deliverable we were passing to my very first client was a set of tables, one for each country we were researching for them. The client, a specialist research buyer within an insight…
Five things you can do with PowerPoint macros
I’ve recently discovered how to do a number of things in PowerPoint using inbuilt VBA (Visual Basic), ie by writing PowerPoint macros, which cannot, as far as I know, be done automatically as part of automation software packages. This means…
Multicoloured dream – using colour in a structured way
Having blogged last week that sometimes it’s best to take out the extraneous colour from a report, I now find myself working on one of the most multi-coloured reports I’ve ever seen – and it’s an absolute joy. The report…
Information or decoration? How we use colour in reporting
In brand and advertising trackers, it’s quite common to colour charts according to the actual brand colours. For example, the bars and line for Coca Cola would be red and Pepsi blue throughout the presentation. It’s easy to automate this…
Scottish Referendum Poll Visualisation
Here’s a quick graphical interactive of polling history during 2014 and the actual result. It’s been a fascinating journey!
Friday Auto Charting: a simple way to get to charts quickly
I’m using the blog this week for a bit of shameless marketing. A number of people have said to me that they would love to find a way of getting their data into visual format without having to do a…
Is the DIY approach to survey reporting a good thing?
In a recent webinar, What’s Hot in Market Research, consultant Ray Poynter described the growing trend for what he called “DIY research”. This includes scripting tools such as Survey Monkey, but also specific aspects of the research process. Reporting must surely…
Going round in circles: exploring circular visualisations
I’ve seen a couple of excellent circular visualisations recently, like this on length of commutes from the world of print – appearing in the April 2014 edition of National Geographic (I can’t find an online equivalent). It tells a…