Say you have a document with a main body and several appendices with supporting information in different sections. You want to make references in the main body to the appendices, including the name of the section and the page number. Like so:

The problem: what if you change the name of the appendix section? Or the page number of the reference changes as the document is edited?

Some people wait until they finish writing the document to finalize the references, and then do it by hand. (And then need to update it by hand again after minor revisions cause page breaks to reflow….) But there is a better way!

Use Word’s Insert Cross-Reference feature along with Heading styles and Word will handle it all for you automagically.

Here’s how inserting those links works:

It’s as easy as that! And now, all you need to do when editing is select all (ctrl-a), then update all (F9) and all your references will be updated instantly.

I hope this saves you a ton of time and annoyance.

I want to recommend a very useful book: Storytelling with Data, by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic. It’s available from the Seattle Public Library. (I wish I could credit where I heard about it, all I know is I put it on my ‘to read’ list about 5 months ago.)

What I really appreciated about it is that is chock-full of highly practical suggestions that can be readily implemented.

It’s also a nice balance of viz authoring advice (much of which will be a refresher if you’ve read Tufte, Few, Yau, Cairo, etc) along with very concrete suggestions for how to present data in a way that can drive action – thinking about the audience, what story you’re telling them, and what you want them to leave with.

Showing the steps involved, whether in building / improving a viz, or in telling a story using data, was tremendously helpful to me – showed how to put principles into practice.

Cole gave a related 15-minute talk at the Tapestry conference – one of my colleagues was there, and their review was:

Brilliantly relevant to our customers.  Cole did a skit of a typical boring business presentation of data findings.  She then itemized a clear set of storytelling techniques: repetition, pictures, narrative arc (plot, rising action, climax, falling action, ending).  She then retold the story.  Might have been the best talk of the day.

Here’s the talk:

I highly recommend the book to anyone who wants to communicate with data.

Aka Italian Fries, as served at the Grill in Macalester College‘s old Student Union (circa 1990s, before the remodel and adding an extra “e” to create the Grille, which seems WAY too healthy to ever serve such a concoction). I got a tip on ingredients list relayed from a friend of a former Grill student worker. Came up with quantities & directions through several (mostly delicious but occasionally ridiculously cheesy) trials.

Update: my friend “Pyronious” who I met when he was living in St. Paul and sharing an apartment with another friend who was a Macalester student (Hi, “Miles”) also had plenty of first-hand experience with the originals. He’s an excellent cook and food photographer; he made this recipe recently and kindly shared this much more attractive photo, showing the way to cut & serve. (Note the strips should be narrow enough to dip into your marinara.) Bask in the beauty!

My original photo, how it’ll look when it’s time to take out of the oven:

Ingredients

• Pizza crust, 12″ (Boboli original is the closest I found, feel free to use your preferred pizza dough – it needs to have some body to be like the originals)
• 4 oz shredded mozzarella
• 4 oz creamy Italian salad dressing (I use Field’s)
• Parmesan cheese
• Olive oil
• Garlic salt
• Pepper
• Marinara sauce

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 450
2. Brush outer ring of pizza dough (crust) w/olive oil
3. Pour 4oz dressing in middle of pizza, brush out to meet crust/oil band. Feel free to go lighter depending on how “juicy” you liked your i-fries.
4. Sprinkle 4 oz mozzarella evenly. (It might look like it’s not enough, but it is.)
5. Grate Parmesan generously over the pizza
6. Garlic salt: 3-6 shakes
7. Pepper:  3-6 grinds
8. Bake at 450 until cheese starts to get a little browning – 8-12 minutes.
9. Take out, let rest for a minute or two so all the cheese doesn’t slide off, slice into 1″ wide strips, rotate 90 degrees and cut all the strips in half
10. Serve with marinara sauce for dipping

What Mac memories do i-fries bring back for you?

Ready to move beyond bullet points for your presentations?

People are visual. If you’re sharing data, try creating a data visualization, instead of a table of numbers. (See Tufte for a start on this.)

And if you’re conveying an idea, a single bold image can be more compelling than a slide full of text. (Check out Presentation Zen and the companion website for much more.)

Here are some of my favorite places to search for images to use in presentations.

1. Flickr search (need another license? More Flickr CC search links here.)
2. Google image search supports usage rights, too. (Google’s help article)
3. Creative Commons search (and as of July 2017, a new CC search is in beta) has pointers and a front end for searching additional resources that support usage rights.

These searches help you find images you have permission to re-use. (The Creative Commons license is a very widely used way of indicating these permissions.)

Always pay attention to re-use rights and respect the creator’s intent – don’t just take any image you find.  If the re-use requires attribution, be a mensch and include the credit in your preso.

Just testing phone links in iOS.

Here’s a tel: URL: 1-408-555-5555

And here’s a phone number with no HTML tags: 1-408-555-5555

Twice as many Americans as Germans want self-driving cars.

That’s one of the first things I learned from asking the next set of questions.

About 400,000 people have put down $1000 each to reserve Tesla’s upcoming Model 3 – the all-electric, potentially self-driving automobile. Some of them even stood in lines that stretched for blocks to put down $1000 on a car they hadn’t even seen pictures of yet. (I’m one of them.)

Teslas can all be custom-ordered. Tesla has a great configuration site where you can pick out every detail – if you’re ordering a Model S or X. But so far, we Model 3 reservation holders don’t even have the opportunity to tell Tesla what color we want.

At least, not through Tesla’s site.

Model3tracker.info to the rescue! This crowd-sourced data lets anyone self-report the options they want to choose for their Model 3. Just register and fill out a survey based off previous official statements, and maybe some rumors and tea-leaf reading, too.

Now, Teslanomics’ Ben Sullins – formerly the Chief Data officer at Pluralsight – has uncracked that dataset with a Tableau Public viz:

We interrupt this blog post to try out different ways around the problem of embedding Tableau Public vizzes on WordPress. Seeing a couple different suggestions using Tableau’s new support search.

Tried using the “logical line breaks” method John Barr described on the Tableau forums.. It did not work, even when I copy/pasted from John’s example. Though clearly it works on his blog.

Ugh. The regular embed code works just fine on WordPress in general – it looks like it’s a problem with specific WordPress themes. Bleah. Ok, for now I’m just going to cheat, strip out most of the embed, and use only the static image. Click through to Tableau Public to interact. There are other approaches I can use, I’ll come back to those…

Alright, back to Tesla datavizzing!

Pretty cool, huh? Seeing this dataviz made me want to ask some more questions, though. What about the rest of the world’s orders? Do we all want the same thing? Let’s see:

I plan to come back to this blog post and update it with a few details about how I made this viz, and keep updating it. Already I’ve tried out a few techniques and features I haven’t previously, and learned a thing or two.

Of course, you can SEE the version and build number of Tableau Desktop from the Help menu, with Help > About.

But usually you want to give this information to someone else – for example, pasting it into an email or support case form.

You could use your eyeballs and fingers, and transcribe the sixteen digits the old-fashioned way.

But I just learned there’s an even easier way to do it.

When the “About” dialog is open, just Copy!

There’s no need to select anything. Just hit Ctrl-C, or right-click > Copy – and you’ll get the version and build right on your clipboard for easy pasting, like so:

9.0.0 (9000.15.0325.1651) 64-bit

Boom.