My point is if a chart is simple and convey the information effectively, it's kind of petty just dismiss it for being a excel chart. Point of making good charts/slide is to communicate effectively, I didn't feel like he necessarily failed at that. The outsource comment (since your post a deriding him being a VP and presenting an excel chart) was to point out that prettying a deck up isn't necessarily a high level work. Now most execs have teams and etc. that would scrub the heck out of it, and yeah, he could've (maybe even should've) clean it before presenting to Congress, but I also don't see it as a big deal.
Let's also look at your link's critiques, keep in mind these are my opinions (and the art of chart making is subjective) and I don't claim to be an expert on chart making - far from it. What I actually agree with: It's unclear what "market share" means: is it share of the number of launches or the revenues generated by those launches? Is the "base" of the market share changing over time? - Not sure what the voice overs when presenting the chart is, but I'd agree it should be more clear. It's also not clear if there were a tag line outside of the chart that would've tied it together What I know is against the best practice/typical corporate preferences but in this case don't believe it hurt the readability of the chart/or likely the story they want to tell: Red Russia is stealing the thunder SpaceX is sharing the blues with Japan/China/Other U.S. The legend is sorted in the opposite way as the column segments (courtesy of Excel defaults) Axis labels given to two decimal places for market share split only a small number of way The last two columns are speculative and these are the two years in which SpaceX has a noticeable advantage (unless they are talking about contracts already concluded) It does go against the typical subjective tastes of what's a good chart, but found it unlikely these things actually hurt the story they were trying to tell, nor was the chart too distracting to the actual audience it was presented to. I will add, given who he is and who he was presenting to, he probably should've cleaned it a little. I just don't know if this was a big deal here. What I think is really wrong He criticized the chart and then went on to make a small multiples chart as an example of a better chart- We're talking about congressmen, some older in age, probably looking at the chart from the perspective of being pasted on a large white board and you're breaking a large chart into 8 smaller charts, with smaller fonts and think it presents the story better? Where is the eyeballs suppose to focus to? If he would've kept the tag line, made a single line charts with 3 labels (Space X, Russia and Others), then I could agree with that been a better/clearer chart (Easily see space X up, Russia down, other's remained flat) but to just propose small multiples actually hurts the credibility of the critique to me. Lastly, maybe the presenter actually knew the congress persons/audiences' preferences he was presenting to well enough that he knew he didn't need to pretty it up for it to be effective.
It's a weird situation, he was born in Mexico, his parents were born in Mexico, but his grandfather was born in America....the argument is that makes him an American citizen via "derived citizenship", but I'm not sure that's true given that I don't think his mother ever officially became a citizen herself, she just came here illegally same as he did. Also, it doesn't help his case that he's got a prior deportation on his record and he came back into the country illegally after that. Now that said, I personally believe that anyone who serves in the military should automatically earn citizenship after they ETS or are otherwise honorably discharged after at least one year of service. Of course since that's not the case, I'm not 100% sure the deportation is unjust, especially since the reason why he's ended up in trouble so many times is due to a long history of drug abuse and legal trouble.
