Data storytelling

Data storytelling gives you a way of sharing your data discovery insights with other people, whether your insights are part of a larger discussion or the main topic.

The purpose of data storytelling is to connect the data discoveries in a story and emphasize elements that are important in your discussions and decision-making. Adding emphasis will help you to create convincing stories to support you and your stakeholders in decision-making.

Data storytelling lets you combine reporting, presentation, and exploratory analysis techniques to create and share for collaboration. You take snapshots of your discovered data (like reports) for use in stories, structured by one or more slides. The snapshots can be enhanced with various effects to let you emphasize the data insights you want your audience to focus on.

As you tell the story to other people, and when new questions arise, you can switch directly to the source of the snapshot and get access to the live data. This opens up the possibility for you to take the story in new directions, triggering new conversations and more insights.

Another way to make storytelling even more interactive and engaging is by inserting live data sheets in slides and making selections in them while presenting the story for your audience.

The story

In data storytelling, you use a story to collect and present insights and ideas to your audience. A story is presented as a timeline with one or more slides, and can be based on traditional data storytelling structures (such as a three-act play, hero’s journey, and so on).

Stories are contained within an app. A story is connected to its app, so you can return to the live data anytime, to discover new and hidden stories.

To build a story you use time-based snapshots of your data visualizations and live data sheets and place them on the story’s timeline.

You can, for instance add text and shapes, put emphasis on certain insights with visual effects, apply styling, and so on, to make the story compelling and engaging, and its purpose very clear.

See: Creating a new story

See: Making a story compelling

See: Exporting a story

Snapshots

A snapshot is a graphical representation of the state (type and data) of a data object at a certain point in time that you can use when you build stories. The snapshot you take is a copy of the state. This means that the state of the snapshot does not change when the state of the corresponding data object gets updated.

Snapshots capture individual objects on a sheet during the analysis process. They store the visualization and data as you see it at that time enabling you to use them at a later point in time to tell a story. Each snapshot contains a bookmark back to the original context so that you quickly get access to the live data.

When you take a snapshot you can make an annotation for your snapshot. The annotation helps you distinguish between the different snapshots in the snapshot library when you build your story. The annotation is not visible when you play the story.

See: Collecting insights for a story using snapshots

See: Selecting insights for a story with the snapshot library

Live data sheets

If you use live data sheets in a story you can make selections in the sheets, while playing the story. This means that you can show your insights for your audience by making selections, without going to the app itself.

When you play a story you can make and reset selections in the live data sheets just as you can in a sheet, in sheet view.

See: Adding a slide to a story

See: Selecting in a live data sheet