Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic’s Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals is a short, practical book about one task: turning an analysis into a chart, a slide or a page that a particular audience will understand and act on. Published by Wiley in November 2015, and written by a former manager on Google’s People Analytics team who had taught data visualisation across the company, it sets out six lessons, from understanding the context to telling a story, and demonstrates them by taking ordinary charts and rebuilding them step by step. Internal auditors do this constantly, in audit committee packs, engagement reports, dashboards of audit metrics and slides for the closing meeting. The book is not written for auditors, but its method answers the question every chief audit executive faces before each committee meeting: what do these directors need to know, and what is the simplest true picture of it?
This guide summarises the book without reproducing it, sets out its structure from the published contents, translates the six lessons into a method for audit committee reporting and audit reports, marks where storytelling has to give way to the objectivity the Global Internal Audit Standards require, notes the companion books published since, and ends with a worked example of a drinks distributor’s audit function rebuilding its quarterly committee pack.
In this guide
- The book in one page
- Who Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic is, and how the book came about
- The structure: ten chapters and six lessons
- The six lessons, read as a method for audit reporting
- Choosing the display for audit data
- Story without spin: storytelling under the Standards
- The nine ideas worth keeping
- The vocabulary: fourteen terms defined for practitioners
- What it means for internal audit: a reporting map
- The criticisms, and what the book leaves out
- Editions, companion books and how to read it
- A one-hour discussion guide for an audit team
- Worked example: MidState Beverage rebuilds its committee pack
- Frequently asked questions
- Related guides
The book in one page
| Question | The answer, in our words |
|---|---|
| What is it? | A guide to communicating with data for people who are not designers: how to decide what a chart is for, choose the right kind of display, strip out what does not help, direct the reader’s eye, apply basic design principles and build the whole into a story. Wiley published it in November 2015, with a foreword by Laszlo Bock, then Google’s senior vice president of people operations. |
| What is the central distinction? | Between exploratory analysis, the work of looking through data to find what is interesting, and explanatory analysis, the work of showing a chosen audience the few things that matter. This guide’s reading is that most weak committee charts are exploratory work presented as if it were explanation. |
| What are the six lessons? | Understand the context; choose an appropriate display; eliminate clutter; draw attention where you want your audience to focus; think like a designer; tell a story. Chapter 8 applies all six to one example. |
| What are its main tools? | The Big Idea, a single sentence that states the presenter’s point of view and what is at stake; the 3-minute story, the message told as if there were only three minutes; storyboarding the sequence before building it; and the use of size, colour and position to signal where to look. |
| How is it taught? | By makeovers. Ordinary charts are rebuilt step by step, five model visuals are dissected, and five case studies cover problems such as dark backgrounds, animation, crowded line graphs and alternatives to pie charts. The lessons are not tied to any software. |
| Why read it as an auditor? | Because audit committee packs, audit reports and dashboards of audit results are explanatory communications to busy readers who must decide something, and because the Standards call for communications that are clear and concise as well as accurate and objective. The book teaches the first two; the auditor has to protect the others. |
| Length | 288 pages in the Wiley paperback; the lessons are taught in chapters 1 to 5 and 7, and chapters 6, 8 and 9 apply them. |
Who Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic is, and how the book came about
Knaflic studied at the University of Washington, where she took a degree in applied mathematics and an MBA, and began her career in banking in Seattle before moving to analytical roles in private equity. She then joined Google as a manager on the People Analytics team, using data to inform the company’s people programmes and management practices, and developed a data visualisation course that she taught at Google offices in the United States and Europe. She also taught Introduction to Information Visualization as an adjunct at the Maryland Institute College of Art. By her company’s account, it was in banking that she first saw how the way data is shown changes how people think about it.
She started storytelling with data in 2010, and the book, her first, followed in 2015. It is written for business professionals rather than designers, and its introduction argues that people are not naturally good at storytelling with data and that common tools make it harder. She is the founder and chief executive of storytelling with data, whose team has run learning sessions for companies, individuals and philanthropic organisations for more than a decade; according to the company, the first book has been translated into a dozen languages and is used as a textbook by more than 100 universities. The later books, a workbook in 2019, a book on presenting in 2022 and a book of makeovers in 2025, build on the same lessons, and in December 2025 Wiley published a hardcover 10th Anniversary Edition of the first.
The structure: ten chapters and six lessons
| Chapter | What it covers | What it contributes |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction | Why bad graphs are everywhere, who the book is for, how the author learned, the six lessons, and the point that the lessons are not tool-specific | The case for learning the skill |
| 1. The Importance of Context | Exploratory versus explanatory analysis; who the audience is, what they should know or do, and how data will make the point; questions to ask; the 3-minute story and the Big Idea; storyboarding | Lesson 1: decide the message before the chart |
| 2. Choosing an Effective Visual | Simple text, tables, graphs, points, lines, bars and area, other types of graph, and those to be avoided | Lesson 2: the small set of displays that do most of the work |
| 3. Clutter Is Your Enemy! | Cognitive load, clutter, the Gestalt principles of visual perception, lack of visual order, non-strategic contrast, and decluttering step by step | Lesson 3: remove what does not help |
| 4. Focus Your Audience’s Attention | How we see, a brief lesson on memory, and preattentive attributes: size, colour and position on the page | Lesson 4: make the reader look where you intend |
| 5. Think Like a Designer | Affordances, accessibility, aesthetics and acceptance | Lesson 5: design for use, and for the audience’s willingness to accept change |
| 6. Dissecting Model Visuals | Five model graphs: a line graph, an annotated line graph with forecast, 100% stacked bars, positive and negative stacked bars, and horizontal stacked bars | Worked demonstrations of the first five lessons |
| 7. Lessons in Storytelling | The magic of story, constructing the story, narrative structure, the power of repetition, and tactics to check that the story is clear | Lesson 6: from charts to a story |
| 8. Pulling It All Together | One example taken through all six lessons in turn | The method end to end |
| 9. Case Studies | Colour on a dark background, animation in presented visuals, logic in ordering, avoiding the spaghetti graph, and alternatives to pie charts | Common problems solved |
| 10. Final Thoughts | Where to go next, building the skill in a team or organisation, and a recap | From individual skill to team capability |
The contents above are those listed in the O’Reilly catalogue and confirmed by a university library’s record of the Wiley edition. The book is front-loaded: the six lessons are taught in chapters 1 to 5 and 7, and chapters 6, 8 and 9 apply them to worked examples, which is where much of its value for a practitioner lies. Chapter 10’s section on building the skill in a team is the part an audit leader should not skip, because a chief audit executive who redesigns the committee pack alone will find the old habits back in the next engagement report.
The six lessons, read as a method for audit reporting
The lessons are written for business presentations, but they translate directly to the communications an audit function produces. The table gives each lesson, what it asks of the presenter, what it means for an audit committee pack or report, and which of the qualities of communication in Standard 11.2 of the Global Internal Audit Standards it serves. Standard 11.2 calls for communications that are accurate, objective, clear, concise, constructive, complete and timely; the book is strongest on clarity and concision, and the right-hand column shows where.
| Lesson | What it asks of the presenter | What it means for audit reporting | Standard 11.2 quality served |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Understand the context | Know who the audience is, what they should know or do, and how data will show it; tell the story in three minutes; state the Big Idea in a sentence; storyboard before building | Write the one-sentence message and the decision sought before choosing a single chart; a committee paper without an ask is a status report | Clear; concise |
| 2. Choose an appropriate display | Choose among a small set of displays, simple text, tables, points, lines, bars and area, and avoid those that hinder reading | Typical audit metrics are counts, ages, rates and trends; they need lines, sorted bars and the occasional large number, not gauges and pies | Clear; accurate |
| 3. Eliminate clutter | Every element costs the reader effort; remove those that add nothing and give the page visual order | Delete gridlines, legends that could be direct labels, borders, 3D effects and charts of audit hours that inform no decision | Concise |
| 4. Focus attention | Use size, colour and position deliberately to show where to look | Grey for context and one colour for the point, such as the high-rated issues past their due date | Clear |
| 5. Think like a designer | Design for how the visual will be used, for readers with different needs, for appearance and for acceptance by the audience | Packs are read on tablets and printed in greyscale; colour-blind directors exist; a new format needs the chair’s agreement before the meeting | Clear; constructive |
| 6. Tell a story | Give the communication a narrative structure, repeat the key point, and use tactics to check that the story is clear | Situation, what has changed, what the committee is asked to do; the summary and the close say the same thing | Constructive; complete |
Two of the lessons carry most of the weight for audit work. The first is context. The book’s distinction between exploratory and explanatory analysis describes the difference between an auditor’s workpapers and an auditor’s report: the workpapers hold the exploration, every analysis tried and every exception examined, and the report should show the audience only what they need. A committee pack that skips that step presents the exploration. The Big Idea, which Knaflic credits to Nancy Duarte’s book Resonate, is a useful discipline for any audit paper: one complete sentence that states the function’s point of view and what is at stake. If the chief audit executive cannot write it, the pack is not ready.
The second is focus. The book’s account of preattentive attributes, the visual properties such as size, colour and position that the eye registers before conscious attention, explains why a page of red, amber and green cells communicates almost nothing: when everything is coloured, nothing stands out. An issue-tracking report in which every row carries a status colour forces the reader to scan; the same report in grey, with the five rows that matter in one strong colour and sorted to the top, does the reader’s work for them. The guide to dashboarding audit results and the audit issue tracking guide describe the metrics; the book supplies the grammar for showing them.
Choosing the display for audit data
Chapter 2 of the book works through a short list of displays, simple text, tables, points, lines, bars and area, before turning to other types of graph and to those best avoided. Under displays to avoid, the book argues, as her blog had in 2011, that pie charts are hard to read because people judge angles and areas poorly, recommending a horizontal bar chart sorted by size instead, and that secondary vertical axes confuse readers, who cannot tell which series belongs to which axis; it also rules out donut charts and 3D, and a case study later offers alternatives to pies. The table applies that discipline to the data audit functions commonly present. The mapping of audit messages to displays is this guide’s, using chart types the book discusses.
| Audit message | Display | Why it works | What to avoid |
|---|---|---|---|
| One number that matters, such as high-rated issues past due | Simple text: the number, large, with a sentence saying what it means | A chart of one or two numbers adds ink and no information | Gauges, dials and single-bar charts |
| A trend over quarters, such as past-due issues or plan completion | Line graph, with the latest point labelled and any change of definition annotated | Shows direction and pace at a glance | Clustered columns per quarter with a legend |
| A comparison across units, such as exceptions by site | Horizontal bars sorted from largest to smallest, labelled directly | Lengths from a common baseline are easy to compare | Pies, donuts and unsorted bars |
| Change between two dates, such as risk ratings this year and last | Slopegraph | Shows which items rose, which fell and by how much | Two side-by-side pies or tables |
| Composition, such as open findings by rating over time | 100% stacked bars or simple bars | Allows parts to be compared across periods | 3D pies, exploded pies, too many segments |
| Movements in a total, such as opening issues plus new less closed | Waterfall chart | Shows how the closing figure was reached | Four numbers in a table with no flow |
| A relationship, such as audit days against findings by engagement | Scatterplot | Shows correlation and the outliers worth asking about | Dual-axis charts |
| Detail the committee may need to look up | Table in an appendix, sorted by the field that matters | Precise values remain available without crowding the story | Traffic-light colouring of every cell |
Risk heat maps deserve a specific note, because they appear in many committee packs. A five-by-five grid of coloured cells is a table with two ordinal axes, and it inherits the weaknesses the book describes: colour used for everything, clutter, and no indication of what the reader should conclude. When the purpose is to show the top risks and how they have moved, a sorted bar of residual ratings or a slopegraph of this year against last year usually says more; when the purpose is the full register, the table belongs in the appendix. The annual risk assessment guide and the board risk reporting guide cover what the content should be.
Story without spin: storytelling under the Standards
The word story makes some auditors uneasy, and the unease is useful. A business presenter uses the book’s method to persuade an audience to act; an internal auditor must also persuade, since a finding that nobody acts on has failed, but under constraints a business presenter does not face. Standard 11.2 calls for communications that are objective and complete as well as clear and concise, and an audit committee relies on the chief audit executive precisely because the function’s account is not a sales pitch. The discipline is to apply the book’s lessons to the presentation of a conclusion that the evidence has already supported, never to the choice of conclusion.
| Storytelling technique | The risk in an assurance setting | The audit safeguard |
|---|---|---|
| Show only what matters | Leaving out the inconvenient data | The appendix holds the complete population; the story shows its most important part, and says so |
| Highlight one series | Implying that the rest are fine when they have not been examined | Say what the grey represents and whether it was tested |
| A strong Big Idea | Overstating certainty | State the basis: sample or population, period, and any limitation of scope |
| Choose the comparison | A flattering or alarming baseline | Use consistent periods and denominators, such as exceptions per thousand transactions |
| Simplify the axis | Truncated bar axes that exaggerate differences | Bars start at zero; lines may be scaled if the scale is labelled |
| Repeat the key point | Repetition becoming advocacy | Repeat the conclusion, not adjectives; let the numbers carry the emphasis |
The structure of the story matters in audit reporting because the reader may read only the first page. Among chapter 7’s tactics for checking that a story is clear is one she calls horizontal logic, which her blog also describes: reading only the titles of the slides should tell the whole story, which means titles that state the point rather than the topic, and an executive summary up front whose bullets match the titles that follow. It is the same discipline as the answer-first structure in the Pyramid Principle summary, and it is what the executive summary guide asks of an audit report: the committee should be able to read the first page and know the conclusion, the significance and the action. The report-writing guide and the guide to the anatomy of an audit report carry the detail.
The nine ideas worth keeping
- Explain; do not explore in public. Exploration belongs in the workpapers; the report and the pack show the audience what they need.
- Context comes before the chart. Who is the audience, what should they know or do, and how will the data show it: answered before the software is opened.
- One sentence first. The Big Idea, a complete sentence with a point of view and the stakes, is the test of whether a communication is ready.
- Three minutes is enough to know your story. If the message cannot be told briefly, a longer pack will not rescue it.
- Simple displays do most of the work. Text, tables, lines and bars cover most audit data; novelty costs the reader effort.
- Clutter is a cost. Every gridline, border and legend asks for attention; remove what does not earn it.
- Colour is a pointer, not decoration. Grey for context and one colour for the point; when everything is red, amber or green, nothing is.
- Design for the reader you have. Accessibility, the format the pack will be read in, and the audience’s acceptance of change are design requirements.
- A story needs structure and repetition. A narrative structure, with the key point said more than once and the titles carrying the message.
The vocabulary: fourteen terms defined for practitioners
| Term | What Knaflic means | What it looks like in audit reporting |
|---|---|---|
| Exploratory analysis | Looking through data to find what is interesting | Fieldwork analytics and workpapers |
| Explanatory analysis | Showing a chosen audience the specific things that matter | The report, the committee pack, the closing-meeting slides |
| Who, what and how | The audience, what they should know or do, and how data will make the point | The planning questions for every committee paper |
| Big Idea | A single sentence stating the presenter’s point of view and what is at stake | The first line of the executive summary |
| 3-minute story | The message told as if only three minutes were available | The briefing given to the audit committee chair before the meeting |
| Storyboarding | Planning the sequence of a communication on paper before building it | Sketching the pack page by page before drafting |
| Cognitive load | The mental effort a visual demands of the reader | Why a 40-slide pack is read less carefully than a 12-slide one |
| Clutter | Visual elements that take up space without aiding understanding | Gridlines, borders, 3D effects, unnecessary legends |
| Gestalt principles | Findings from psychology about how people group what they see | Aligning and spacing elements so that related items read as a group |
| Preattentive attributes | Properties such as size, colour and position that the eye registers before conscious attention | One highlight colour for the issues that need a decision |
| Affordances | Design features that show how a visual should be used | Direct labels, ordered rows and clear titles |
| Accessibility | Designing so that readers with different needs can use the visual | Colour-blind-safe palettes and charts that survive greyscale printing |
| Acceptance | Getting an audience to accept a new design | Agreeing a new pack format with the committee chair first |
| Spaghetti graph | A line graph with so many crossing lines that none can be followed | Plotting every business unit’s issue count on one chart |
What it means for internal audit: a reporting map
The table maps the book’s lessons onto the communications an audit function produces, with the procedure each one changes. The site’s guides to reporting to the audit committee, the committee deck template and presenting to the committee give the content; the book governs the form.
| Audit activity | What the book implies | Procedure it changes |
|---|---|---|
| Quarterly audit committee pack | Explanatory, with context first | Open each paper with the Big Idea and the decision sought; move status detail to an appendix |
| Dashboards of audit metrics | A standing dashboard monitors; a story explains | Keep a stable dashboard for monitoring and add one page each quarter explaining what changed; see the dashboarding guide |
| Engagement reports | Choose the simplest display that supports the conclusion | One chart per key finding at most, placed beside the condition it supports; see the model report examples |
| Executive summaries | Titles and summary carry the story | Write action titles; check that the summary alone gives conclusion, significance and action |
| Findings built on analytics | Show the point against its context | Present exceptions against the population and the period; document the query behind each chart as evidence; see the analytics evidence guide |
| Risk assessment and plan | Clutter and colour hide the message | Replace dense heat maps with sorted bars or slopegraphs of the top risks; keep the full register in an appendix |
| Presenting in the room | Storyboard, rehearse, repeat | Brief the chair with a three-minute version; rehearse the opening; close on the decision sought |
| The function’s methodology | Build the skill in the team, not one person | Put chart and pack standards in the methodology manual and review reports against them |
One procedure deserves emphasis: the accuracy of the chart itself. A chart in a committee pack is information produced by the audit function, and it can be wrong in the same ways as any report, through a filter applied to the wrong field, a definition that changed between quarters or a manual step in a spreadsheet. The function should hold its own charts to the standard it applies to management’s, with the source data and the steps behind each figure retained, as the guide to testing information produced by the entity describes for management reports.
The criticisms, and what the book leaves out
Reviews have been broadly favourable and the reservations consistent. A 2016 review by Martin Monkman, cross-posted to R-bloggers, praised the book’s focus on why good graphics work and its step-by-step method, while noting that its examples are built in Excel, so users of other tools must translate them. A review on the Baryon design blog found that it can read like a syllabus, that it deliberately avoids complex or striking examples, and that it is better suited to beginners than to experienced practitioners. The Better Posters blog, in 2022, called it the best book it had found so far on improving default spreadsheet charts, but warned that the word storytelling may put off scientists and that some of the wording can sound overly flowery. A 2021 review in Information Research of the companion workbook made two points that apply to both books: there are few references to the research behind the advice, and the method assumes the data have already been prepared.
For auditors the omissions are of three kinds. The first is objectivity: the book is written for presenters who are entitled to advocate, not for a function whose communications must be balanced and complete, which is why the safeguards in the table above are this guide’s addition. The second is data integrity: a well-designed chart of wrong numbers is more dangerous than a cluttered one, because it is more convincing. The third is the standing dashboard. The book is about explanatory communication, not about standing monitoring dashboards; its 2025 companion addresses the point directly with a chapter on explaining with data stories rather than dashboards. Readers who want more of the theory behind the advice can go to Edward Tufte, whom the book cites, starting with The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and those who want the misleading-chart side of the subject to Alberto Cairo’s How Charts Lie (W. W. Norton, 2019).
Editions, companion books and how to read it
| What | Details | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| The book | Wiley, November 2015, 288 pages, paperback with ePDF and ePub editions; a hardcover 10th Anniversary Edition (December 2025, 336 pages) keeps the ten chapters and adds a look back at the decade and three appendices | The six lessons |
| The workbook | storytelling with data: let’s practice!, Wiley, October 2019, 448 pages; exercises with worked solutions organised around the same lessons | Teams that want to practise together |
| On presenting | Storytelling with You: Plan, Create, and Deliver a Stellar Presentation, Wiley, September 2022, 384 pages | Chief audit executives presenting to committees |
| The makeovers | Storytelling with Data: Before and After, with Mike Cisneros and Alex Velez, Wiley, September 2025, 432 pages; twenty makeovers, including chapters on reporting with a purpose and on data stories versus dashboards | Applying the lessons to real reports and dashboards |
| For children | Daphne Draws Data, a children’s book for ages 6 to 10 | Outside the audit library |
| Translations | The company says the first book has been translated into a dozen languages | Colleagues reading in other languages |
| Reading plan | Chapter 1 slowly; chapters 2 to 5 with the last committee pack open beside them; chapter 7; then chapter 8 as revision | An audit manager preparing for the next committee cycle |
| Companion reading | The Pyramid Principle summary for answer-first structure; the guide to writing for the board for the words around the charts | Placing the method |
A one-hour discussion guide for an audit team
- Ten minutes: the last pack. Count its pages, its charts and the decisions it asked the committee to take. Note how many charts supported a decision.
- Fifteen minutes: the Big Idea. Each member writes the Big Idea of the last pack in one sentence. Compare the sentences; if they differ, the pack did not have one.
- Fifteen minutes: declutter one chart. Take the busiest chart in the pack and rebuild it as a group: remove clutter, sort, label directly, and use one colour for the point.
- Ten minutes: the sceptic’s test. For the rebuilt chart, ask what a sceptical director would say is missing, and decide whether the appendix answers it.
- Ten minutes: the standards. Agree three chart rules for the methodology manual and who will review the next pack against them; the committee annual agenda guide shows where the papers fall in the year.
Worked example: MidState Beverage rebuilds its committee pack
MidState Beverage is a fictional drinks distributor operating in three states, with three distribution centres, a fleet of delivery trucks and an internal audit function of six: the chief audit executive, a manager and four auditors. The audit committee chair had told the chief audit executive after the December 2026 meeting that the pack was thorough and unread. It ran to 46 slides, with 11 charts, including a 3D pie of the 58 open findings by rating, a stacked bar of audit hours by auditor and month, and a red, amber and green table of all 58 issues. The committee had 40 minutes for internal audit and had spent 31 of them on the first twelve slides, which covered progress on the plan. For the first meeting of 2027 the chief audit executive rebuilt the pack using the six lessons.
| Lesson | What the old pack did | What the new pack does | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Context and the Big Idea | No statement of what the committee should know or decide | Opens with one sentence: nine high-rated issues are past due, more than twice as many as a year ago, and six sit with distribution operations; the committee is asked to call for a recovery plan | The decision is on page one |
| Choose the display | 3D pie of findings by rating; gauges for plan progress | The number 9, large, with a line graph of past-due high-rated issues over eight quarters; a line of engagements completed against plan | The trend is visible without explanation |
| Eliminate clutter | Gridlines, legends, borders, a logo on every slide; the audit-hours chart | Direct labels, no gridlines, the audit-hours chart removed because it informed no decision | 46 slides became 9, with 5 in the appendix |
| Focus attention | Every issue coloured red, amber or green | Horizontal bars of days past due for the nine issues, sorted, in grey, with the six operations items in one colour | The committee saw the concentration at once |
| Think like a designer | Colours that disappeared when printed; small type | One highlight colour that survives greyscale printing; larger type; the same page order every quarter, agreed with the chair | Directors could read the printed pack |
| Tell a story | Engagement summaries copied from the reports in date order | Situation, change, ask: the plan is on track except two deferred IT audits; issues are ageing in one area; the route settlement audit shows why | The summary and the close make the same point |
The route settlement audit, which had examined how drivers’ cash and cheque collections from bars and restaurants were reconciled to deliveries, supplied the pack’s one engagement chart. The draft report had four tables of shortages by distribution centre and month. The new pack used one sorted bar chart of shortages per thousand cash deliveries for each centre over the year, with the centre whose rate was more than three times the others’ in the highlight colour, and a single sentence saying that the reconciliation at that centre had been performed by the same supervisor who approved the drivers’ variances. The complete monthly tables went into the appendix, and a note on the chart stated that all cash deliveries in the year had been analysed rather than a sample.
The chief audit executive also applied two of the safeguards in the objectivity table above. The pack reported the good news alongside the bad, that five high-rated issues had closed on time in the quarter, and the past-due line used the same issue definition throughout, with an annotation where the rating scale had changed in 2025. Before the meeting the chief audit executive gave the chair a three-minute version by telephone. The committee spent 25 of its 40 minutes on the two matters it was asked to decide, called the chief operating officer to its next meeting with a recovery plan, and asked that the new format be kept. By the end of the second quarter of 2027 the number of past-due high-rated issues had fallen from nine to three. The example is fictional; the method, a single sentence first and every chart in service of it, is the one this summary takes from the book.
Frequently asked questions
Is Storytelling with Data only for presentations?
No. The lessons apply to any explanatory communication: a slide, a report page, an email or a dashboard page that explains what changed. Its focus is explanation for a chosen audience rather than the design of standing monitoring dashboards, which its 2025 companion book discusses.
Does the book say never to use pie charts?
It includes a section on displays to avoid and a case study on alternatives to pie charts, and that section argues, as the author’s blog did in 2011, that pies are hard to read because people judge angles and areas poorly. For audit data a sorted bar chart usually shows the comparison more clearly.
Which software does it use?
The lessons are not tied to any tool. The book’s examples were built in Excel, as the book itself notes, and the same principles apply in PowerPoint, Power BI, Tableau or code; the Excel guide for auditors covers the mechanics.
How does storytelling fit with the objectivity the Standards require?
By applying the lessons to the presentation of conclusions the evidence already supports, never to the choice of conclusion. Standard 11.2 calls for communications that are objective and complete as well as clear and concise; an appendix with the full data and stated limitations keeps the story honest.
Which of the companion books should an auditor read?
The workbook, let’s practice!, for a team learning together; Storytelling with You for a chief audit executive who presents to committees; and Before and After for makeovers of real reports and dashboards.
What should an auditor read alongside it?
The Pyramid Principle summary for the structure of the words, and the guide to reports people actually read; the internal audit reading list sets out the wider library by theme.
Related guides
- Dashboarding Audit Results: KPI Design for Audit Committees and Management — the metrics behind the charts
- Reporting to the Audit Committee: The Quarterly Pack That Earns Its Airtime — what the pack should contain
- The CAE’s Audit Committee Deck Template: Quarterly Reporting Slides That Work — a template to apply the lessons to
- Presenting to the Audit Committee: Ten Minutes That Define Your Function — the delivery in the room
- The Executive Summary: One Page That Decides Your Report’s Fate — the page the committee reads first
- The Pyramid Principle by Barbara Minto: Summary and Lessons for Audit Reports — answer-first structure for the words
- The Best Books for Internal Auditors — where this book sits among the others
- All book summaries — the full set of summaries for auditors
- On Writing Well by William Zinsser: Summary and Lessons for Audit Reports — clear, simple prose for audit reports.
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