The book Storytelling with Data by Cole Nussbaumer Knafflic is the title of a very popular book. It’s full title is Storytelling with Data a data visualization guide for business professionals. The objective of the author is to teach the reader how to tell stories with data, not just to be able to produce a chart in Excel. Anyone can do that. The tools today are powerful, but the visualizations may not be. However, a well-told story based on data is persuasive and memorable, and can can help decision-makers make better decisions.

Why am I reading this book and why was it written, aside from the above mentioned reasons? Communicating with data visualizations is not something that we’ve been taught in school, normally. Designing and producing good data visualization is a skill that we are not naturally good at, as evidenced by the number of bad graphs out there in the world. We can learn to develop great data visualizations and presentations, but it will take some effort.