What the Font !

Click photo to enlarge 
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY

On July 4, 2012, Dr. Fabiola Gianotti, Coordinator of the ATLAS experiment at CERN, announced that their team had discovered the Higgs Boson. Dr. Gianotti shared the results from the Large Hadron Collider with a group of expectant scientists through a presentation describing what many termed as possibly the most important scientific discovery of the century. The only problem was that Dr. Gianotti used the much criticized Comic Sans font on her presentation slides to announce this momentous discovery and this became a subject of considerable criticism and debate among the scientific community. Most people felt that Gianotti ought to have used a more serious and professional font to communicate such an important discovery. 

Silly as it may sound, this incident underscores that fonts matter a lot in the professional world and document creators must always be aware of this fact. In a widely quoted essay – The Secret Life of Fonts – designer Phil Renaud, who was then a university student, analyzed his assignment grades and drew a correlation between his grades and the fonts used by him. Renaud, after observing that he got the best grades whenever he used the Georgia Font in his essays, loosely concluded that fonts, if anything, seemed to have a subconscious impact on the reader. Renaud noted the possible superiority of some fonts over others in the following words: 

"What I’m not opposed to saying, however, is that the style used in an essay certainly seems to influence grading tendencies, even if that is at an unconscious level. I think that it’s possible that a person sees a Serif font and thinks “proper, academic”, and sees a Sans font and thinks 'focus is on the style, not the substance; must lack integrity'. Maybe."

A paper by Princeton professors Yauman, Oppenhiemer and Vaughan also highlights how changing the fonts of educational material can impact learning outcomes ( it interestingly argues that educational material content presented in harder to read fonts is remembered longer by students !)  

In the recent times, the term Font Psychology has gained considerable traction. Canva defines font psychology as the study of how different fonts impact thoughts, feelings, and behaviors .   Read this fantastic article by Canva and another highly engaging article  by Aashish Pahwa to understand font psychology and why fonts are so fundamental to convey marketing messages for companies. Digital synopsis presents a great pictorial guide summarizing the font psychology concept.

So an interesting question emanates from the above discussion – is there something like a best font for serious professional writing? Well if an interesting New York times experiment by film maker & author Errol Morris is anything to go by, the answer is – yes there is! Morris floated an innocuous quiz in this experiment asking random respondents to agree or disagree with a statement of the famous Oxford physicist David Deutsch, about the possibility of asteroids hitting the earth. Unknown to the readers was the fact that every time someone visited the page, the quoted paragraph appeared randomly in one of the six carefully chosen fonts. After scientifically analyzing quiz responses from 45,000 respondents, Morris concluded that most number of respondents strongly agreed with Dr. Deutsch’s statement that asteroids will hit earth whenever it was presented in the Baskerville font. Baskerville was the clear winner, the King of Fonts! Typography nerds can read the history and evolution of this famed font in  this article by Jon Robinson. Having said that,  it is important to realize that fonts are ever evolving and there are many great new font choices that can be used for serious academic and professional writing. 

Now that we know that fonts are quite important, one is tempted to ask – from where can I get interesting new fonts that are not on my computer? Well there is bad news and good news. The bad news is that most fonts, as you might have guessed, need to be purchased. The good news is that there are also resources online from where you can download interesting fonts for your documents and presentations, for free. Notable among these are: 

• Open Font Library: http://openfontlibrary.org/ 
• Google Fonts : https://www.google.com/fonts#

(This Google Fonts site also has some great free icons for almost any situation that you can use in docs,websites and presentations. Click on icons tab on top !) 

• Font Squirrel : http://www.fontsquirrel.com (Some Free) 
• DaFont: http://www.dafont.com (Some Free) 
  

 

Just download any font from these sites, unzip the downloaded file, right click and choose install. The font should become available in all LibreOffice and MS Office applications. So go ahead and get some great fonts and wow your audience and readers with classy documents, brochures and presentations. And if the prospect of higher grades is compellingly alluring and your heart is thus set on trying out Baskerville for that next graded essay (Not Baskerville Old Face), use LibreOffice 7.2 which comes pre-installed with a near identical cousin called Libre Baskerville. MS Word die-hards can download and install Libre Baskerville for free from here. (Don't just get fixated on Baskerville. There are many other very good fonts to explore!)

Dr. Mark Womack from the University of Houston, in his outstanding writing handbook offers some useful advise (Updated May, 2021) on the choice of fonts for academic writing which are pre-installed in MS Word and Apple Macs (alternatives to Baskerville!).Some great advise on practical typography that you can use are also available here. 

And if you are still not convinced about the power of the humble font, you MUST see this !

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Industry 4.0, Sustainability and the Circular Economy

Figure 1: Industry 4.0

Credit : Christoph Roser [ CC BY-SA 4.0, Industry 4.0]

This post is as much about tuning readers into a recent discussion about information technology and sustainability as it is about demystifying terms and concepts in which this discussion is embedded.  The subject of this enthusiastic discussion is the anticipation of the next industrial revolution which is popularly dubbed as Industry 4.0.  Figure 1 presents a schematic snapshot of what this means and this Forbes article by Bernard Marr provides a synoptic summary of the concept. Closely linked to this discussion is the concept of what is being called a Circular Economy.  This short article and video by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation beautifully summarizes the concept of circular economy.    

If you are wondering why is all the above relevant to this Blog then I must quickly mention that it is not everyday that Information Technology and Sustainability cross paths in the way that is happening with Industry 4.0. In fact the buzz is so high that just a few days ago (23rd August 2019),  The Hindu published an interview with Mr. Li Yong, Director-General of the  United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) on how Industry 4.0 will make the planet more sustainable.  

Mikkel Stein Knudsen and Jari Kaivo-oja from the Finland Futures Research Institute, University of Tukru, present a more expansive and rounded discussion on this subject for those who want to explore this interface in more detail.

While talk has already started about Industry 5.0 , some people are not so enamoured by industry buzzwords and seeing this progression as unsustainable, interpret Industry 5.0 differently (Figure 2 - Click to enlarge). They too might have a point — after all industrialization and sustainability have not exactly been simpatico thus far ! 

Figure 2: Industry 5.0

Credit: Letmeseenow and ChristophRoser, based on File:Industry 4.0.png [CC BY-SA 4.0 ]

What do you think ?

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A Chart is Worth a Thousand Cells !

Excel has options to create some great non-conventional charts. For this post, I have tried to compile some real life examples for some of these charts. So here goes !

Bubble Chart

I came across this interesting bubble chart that maps movie release date (X), movie budget (Y) and Worldwide gross earnings (Z - the size of the bubble)

http://bit.do/e5sqS

While the site does not provide the data that was used to create this chart, the following website does have all the data that you need to recreate this kind of chart in excel. You need to copy name of the movie, release date, production budget and worldwide release data columns into excel and give it a shot !

https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/budgets/all

While on the subject of bubble charts, why not visit gapminder.org - a free interactive data visualization tool based on reliable public data. They have an interesting bubble chart that displays life expectancy, GDP income and population revealing a startling fact that people from rich countries live longer. Play around with other data options like changing population to income for bubble sizes. It's interactive and fun !

http://bit.do/e5ssA

There is another bubble chart created by UNEP that shows wealth and per capita CO2 emissions. 

Treemap Chart

This example of a tree map chart comes from the World Bank which analyses country wise trade data (import /export). When  you visit this site do  try "other visualizations" and press the download button to get the data. Try creating this chart yourself in excel using the downloaded data.

http://wits.worldbank.org/visualization/country-analysis-visualization.html 

Radar Chart or Spider Chart ( looks like a spiders web doesn't it !)

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) presents this great radar chart which helps compare a countries performance on five indicators and compare it with global average. Interestingly, the source of this chart is called a traffic light table (remember constitutional formatting!) . Have a look ( scroll down halfway)

https://www.oecd.org/dev/migration-development/knomad-dashboard.htm

Another interesting radar chart as part of a research paper comparing three technologies. Read just above and below the graph for an interpretation of the chart

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-25718-1_12#Fig3 

Sunburst Chart ( Nested Pie Chart)

Sunburst chart shows hierarchical data. An interesting example is as follows.

Example  : Energy Consumption and Energy Sources for some countries

If you wish to try out this chart in excel, you will have to type out this data ( Yes !) as shown in the picture on the right ( click on the pic to enlarge).

Waterfall Chart

Waterfall charts are great to show postive and negative cumulative totals like cash flows etc.

Example - Cash Flows Analysis

Example - Cash Flows With Totals 


I hope this post helps in providing some additional insights into some unconventional charts and creating better data visualizations.

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A Second Dose of MS Excel

In this post I would like to share a few more videos that I have created to illustrate some other interesting Excel concepts.  The focus of the tutorials featured in this post is to connect the dots by tying basic concepts and using them in real life scenarios.So here is the second dose of MS Excel:

 Video Tutorial 6: Using VLOOKUP to create Business Reports

Real life scenario and use case: You have lots of data in your spreadsheets and you want to create summary reports pulling out relevant data items from these sheets. Using the VLOOKUP function and concepts in Video 8, you can create many useful business reports. This shows an interesting practical use of the VLOOKUP function and why it is so sought after by 'Excellers' .

Video Tutorial 7:  Data Consolidation in MS Excel

Real life scenario and use case : You have many offices or branches and each office sends you data in different Excel workbooks by email. Using the consolidation tool in Excel, you can summarize data in these different sheets & workbooks on one sheet. A great skill to learn that can save you hours of work!

Video Tutorial 8: Tables and Data Validation Using Dynamic Lists

Real life scenario and use case: You want to provide users with drop down lists to select data making sure that as data is added to your sheet, the drop down continues including the newly entered data and this list keep dynamically evolving.  We will use the concepts in this video to great effect in the next tutorial to create interesting business reports. 

Video Tutorial 9: Entering, Modifying and Deleting Data Using Forms

Real life scenario and use case : You have a huge sheet and you want to enter, modify or delete data cleanly without scrolling up, down, left or right in those humongous spreadsheets. This easy trick shows you how.

Hope you enjoyed these video lessons. There is a lot more to know and I am sure these short tutorials will motivate you to keep learning !

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Enhancing MS Excel Skills

MS Excel is undoubtedly a business managers best friend. Becoming better at Excel is therefore a truly worthy goal for budding managers. Through this post, I wish to share a few short video tutorials that I have created to help students to explore a little more of Excel. These are just pointers and you can explore these topics in more details for other use cases. So here goes my tutorial list:

Video Tutorial 1: How to Protect your Excel Sheet

Video Tutorial 2: Some Time Saving Excel Tips

Video Tutorial 3: VLOOKUP Function - Part 1 (Exact Matches)

Video Tutorial 4: VLOOKUP Function - Part 2 ( Approximate Matches)

Video Tutorial 5: Microsoft Excel : Pivot Tables

Video Tutorial 6: Using Array Formulas

For those of you who wish to  improve your Excel skills further, edX has a few free MS Excel courses on business and data analytics. Enroll and start learning !

MS Excel has a huge and committed global fan following. Professor Clint Tuttle, of the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin  has even created this totally awesome MS Excel Song to musically motivate his students to learn and become better at Excel.What commitment from this really cool dude ! 

And still some say professors are boring !   Liars !

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