This screencast will take a table that is competently-organized and improve it to expert level. I’ll use an actual table (five rows and five columns) from a draft paper that I’m revising. The current version presents the bare data but does not tell a story. In fact, the key result is difficult to find. The revised version will organize the same data in a way that emphasizes the key result. I’ll describe the questions I ask myself, the way those questions drive the reformatting, and highlight how the new organization guides the reader’s eye through the argument.
There’s likely more material available than will fit in 5 minutes, so I’ll focus on the most important revisions.
I want to use a simple presentation method, so that the viewer is not distracted by the software. I propose to prepare successive revisions of the table in advance in MS Word or LaTeX, then scroll through them on the screen, highlighting the changes at each step using OmniDazzle. There won’t be any keystrokes or commands to talk about, just narration of why a column was moved, added, reformatted, or reordered and how that graphical change clarifies the argument.