#creativereporting

The Data Visualization and Creative Reporting, class, is my second favorite class out of the Business Intelligence Program. The first week we created an infographic and charts that described who were.  I found this to be a challenge;  it is always hard to talk about yourself. The second week was also challenging, we were given options for movies and had to explain their plot using only visualizations.  I chose a favorite “The Sound of Music”, even though I knew the movie, it was still hard trying to gather data to put into visualizations.

Week three was the most fun for me, we created a super hero dashboard.  I chose Iron Man, I created gauges and boxes like schedules and text messages that would be useful for Iron Man’s everyday life.  I added in innuendos from the recent Spider-Man: Homecoming movie and turned my dashboard into a presentation with the “I am Iron Man” theme song. Lastly, week four was the most challenging, but most important, as we were taking everything we have learned over the month and adding it all together to create visualizations and dashboards for our working companies.  

The biggest take away for this class is understanding that data visualization is important and being able to express the data visually can be more impactful than just plain graphs/charts.  The analogy that I learned in this class (during one of our video/reading assignments), is that data is like a cake, it can have layers of information, if those layers are not correct or don't contain good ingredients, it doesn’ t matter how much frosting and design you put on the cake, it's still not going to be a good cake.  If the layers of the cake are correct or have good ingredients and there is only a little bit of frosting, the cake is going to be good, not great but good enough to eat. Having the ability to serve an audience a great piece of cake will be more reliable and impactful, they are more likely to understand the data/message being communicated.   

Data Visualization and Creative Reporting (VCR) has been the most fun course within the program. It was a nice change of pace from the previous two courses. I was very happy that VCR provided the opportunity to be more creative. VCR exceeded my expectations by providing a variety of fun assignments and encouraging the use of multiple visualization tools. I was able to take the time to gain more experience with Tableau. I do think it would be helpful if some time was taken during the program to provide instruction on this software like it was with Visio.

At the beginning of the course I was excited to realize that one of the textbooks was a book that I had previously considered buying and reading for fun. I have always been impressed by creative visualizations and was excited to learn how to branch out from just doing standard charts and graphs. The Lord of the Rings and superhero assignments were by far my favorite assignments throughout the entire program. I am a fan of these two subjects and it was a great opportunity to mix what I’m learning with topics that I am passionate about. I was enjoyed the time spent learning how to make infographics. I think this is a very effective way of presenting large amounts of data to the general public. The visuals are eye catching and have a better chance that the viewer will read all of the information.

Data Visualization & Creative Reporting met my original expectations in nearly every sense.    I have gained experience in explaining complex systems and presenting complex results to diverse audiences.  I have learned to develop effective visualizations and infographics.  More importantly, I have learned that telling a story with visualizations can be the most effective way to tell a story.  My perceptions have expanded to understand how numbers can in fact tell a story.  Likewise, I have learned that doing so effectively is a skill that takes much practice.  I have also learned to develop dashboards.

I did not feel my skill set was up to par when entering this course. Therefore, I have completed three (3) Lynda training courses and obtained certifications for Tableau, Visio, and R in Excel.  This has proved very helpful.  I am very enthralled by creative reporting and visual information design.  This course has initiated discovery into career possibilities in this realm.  I have always had a pent up creative side, that my left (logical) brain tends to get in the way of professionally.  Being able to connect and manifest both sides of my brain in creatively storytelling of complex, logical concepts is perfect for me.

I did have unrealistic expectations of user interface/experience design, web-based reporting, and software applications.  I now understand how this is outside the scope of this course.  I will be furthering my R education on Lynda as well as learning Python programming to aid in visual reporting.  Moreover, I am registered for several free Tableau webinars that I highly recommend. The Tableau website offers a plethora of learning opportunities.  

Data Visualization and Creative Reporting was an amazing course. This month I was able to take the time to focus on the impact of my visualizations. Everything that I had in mind about design creation was mostly accurate prior to the start of the course. However, the textbook provided enabled students to dive deeper in to aesthetics of visualization and design & development considerations such as, how to define your audience, data mapping, visualizing spatial relationships and more.

  Breath of Fresh Air: Acquired Skills

Conducting research to complete each assignment this month enabled me to get a concrete definition to regression analysis and correlations that can confidently articulate to my audience. Online courses can be very complex however, I was able to train myself on IBM’s SPSS software and the video tutorials provided by Lynda.com gave further explanation to the statistical analysis techniques that we’ve previously explored. Unfortunately, I was unable to submit an assignment using the software since it was a trail based subscription and I needed time to learn the program prior to applying my new skills, however I do plan on using it for my upcoming capstone project. In particular, I am anxious to discover information that was once unknown and now found, using scatter plot matrices. Scatter-plot Matrices was introduced to me during SPSS training and is a wonderful way to tackle large volumes of data and get a quick snapshot of relationships by adding regression lines. This skill has given me a starting point for story telling through visualization that will open up interesting discussions.

  Moving Forward