StoryTelling with Charts - The Full Story

I’ll be honest: I almost bailed 20 minutes into *StoryTelling with Charts* when the virtual narrator hit me with the auditory equivalent of a PowerPoint read aloud. There’s no inflection, no emphasis—just a relentless march through Schreim’s dense, jargon-heavy framework like a GPS reciting turn-by-turn directions to ‘Persuasion City.’ The irony? A book about *storytelling* narrated by a voice that couldn’t sell me a glass of water in the Sahara. I cranked the speed to 1.75x just to survive. That said, Schreim’s no-nonsense breakdown of how to manipulate data visuals for impact has a perverse charm. His chapter on ‘chart psychology’—how to use color, spacing, and annotations to guide an audience’s eye—is the closest this gets to *Influence*-level tactics for the Excel set. I also appreciated his rant against ‘default chart syndrome’ (looking at you, 3D bar graphs), though his obsession with ‘logical flow’ starts to feel like a hostage negotiation by Hour 4. The absence of real-world examples (where’s the “how we used this to win the Q3 budget” war story?) makes it feel like a textbook, not a toolkit. And the production? Flat as a line graph with no data. If you’re a data analyst who’s ever been told your decks are ‘too dry,’ there’s value here—but budget for a human narrator next time.