SEGRO Courses

Home | Excel | Power BI | Copilot | Visualising Data

Visualising Data Course Outline

Duration

The course is split over 2 days, a full day workshop and a 2½ hour follow up session a few weeks later.

Knowledge Pre-requisites

None.

Learning Outcomes

The purpose of this course is ‘learn best practice’ and some ‘golden rules about visualising data’. Most of the course is in the format of group discussion and team exercises. The learning objectives are:

• understand how to build a visualisation that communicates effectively to an audience,
• learn best practices and golden rules of data visualisation and
• understand how to choose the right chart for your data.

In the exercises, attendees are split into groups of 3-4 people. Attendees stay in the same group for all the exercises in the course.

Typical Agenda

9am Welcome

Introduction to the Visualising Data Course.

9:15am: Review Of Public Visualisations (Group Discussion)

The trainer will provide links to several public visualisations. Each group of 4-5 people chooses one visualisation and analyses the purpose, audience, design decision and whether it works well. Each group makes a short presentation to the class.

11am Part 2: Golden Rules and Best Practices in Data Visualisation (Class discussion)

This is a group discussion. The trainer shows several different visualisations of the same dataset, for example as a bar chart, line chart, scatter plot, map, and some more unusual and innovative charts. The class decide which charts works well with which type of data. We conclude with some guidelines, golden rules and best practices.

12:30pm Lunch

1:30pm Design and Build a Data Visualisation (Group Exercise)

The trainer will provide two public datasets to each group. (Each group will have different datasets to the other groups). Each group chooses one of their datasets and designs a visualisation to explain an insight or tell a story found in the data. Groups implement their visualisation with marker pens on the whiteboard. Each group makes a short presentation to the class to discuss the design of their visualisation.

4pm Conclusions and Next Steps

Summarise the lessons learned during the day.

Visualising Data Course - Follow Up Session

This is a virtual (Teams) session lasting 2½ hours held about three weeks after the course.

Between the workshop and the follow-up session, each group is asked to complete some “homework” to design their dream visualisation based on a SEGRO dataset that they choose. Groups can implement the visualisation with any technology or software that they choose including marker pens on the whiteboard.

During the follow up session, each group will present their visualisation to the class, in a “show and tell” session. They will reflect on the design process and the lessons learned – for example, an explanation of the design considerations and approach taken.
There will then be a class discussion about how we can improve each visualisation even further.