Reporting and storytelling with data
You summarise analysis for its audience, choose the right chart, write reports in a finding–evidence–recommendation structure and produce an automated weekly report.
Level 201 · 16 lessons · 12 practice labs
Lessons
Knowing the reader
- Who is reading: analyst, manager, auditor
- The key message: a one-sentence conclusion
- Finding, evidence, recommendation
- Quick task: rewrite a technical summary for managers
Showing numbers
- Readable tables: rounding, units, order
- Choosing a chart for the question
- Adding notes and context to charts
- Honest axes and misleading charts
- Quick task: fix a misleading chart
Producing the report
- A report skeleton in Markdown
- Generating a report automatically with Python
- Exporting to HTML and PDF
- Redaction and privacy before sharing
- Quick task: a weekly report template
Presenting
- Presenting findings and preparing for questions
- Capstone: a monthly security incidents report
Practice labs
- A one-sentence conclusion: Read a two-page technical analysis note and write the one-sentence key message for a manager plus the three numbers that support it.
- Finding, evidence, recommendation: Reorganise a messy analysis output into finding, evidence and recommendation order and write it to findings.md.
- Three summaries for three readers: Prepare three summaries of the same incident analysis for an analyst, a manager and an auditor, each with a different length and emphasis.
- A readable table: Make an unrounded, unitless, unsorted results table readable by rounding, adding units and sorting it.
- Add context to a chart: Add a target line, an incident note and a data-source caption to a traffic chart and rewrite the title so it answers the question.
- Fix misleading report charts: Find the truncated axis, cherry-picked period and wrong ratio in four charts from a monthly report and produce an honest version of each.
- A Markdown report skeleton: Prepare a Markdown template for a weekly security report with summary, findings and appendix sections and filled-in placeholders.
- Fill the report with Python: Write a script that computes the numbers and a chart from a CSV, fills the Markdown report automatically and converts it to HTML with pandoc.
- A reproducible report pipeline: Build a script that takes a date range as an argument, produces the report and proves with a checksum that two runs on the same input give the same output.
- Redact before sharing: Find personal data, internal IPs and server names in a report draft going outside and produce the redacted version.
- Preparing for questions: Write five tough questions management may ask about a findings presentation and a short, data-backed answer to each.
- A leak through PDF metadata: Find information left in a shared PDF report's metadata and hidden layers and produce a clean version.
About this course
You summarise analysis for its audience, choose the right chart, write reports in a finding–evidence–recommendation structure and produce an automated weekly report.
What you will learn
- Knowing the reader
- Showing numbers
- Producing the report
- Presenting
Prerequisites
Finishing the level 101 courses of the same path, or knowing those topics, is enough.
Lab environment
Lessons run in your own Kali Linux terminal that opens in the browser. Nothing to install; the lab starts clean in every lesson.
Frequently asked questions
- Is this course right for my level?
- The course is at level 201; it assumes you know the topics of the lower-level courses.
- Is there anything to install?
- No. Every lesson runs in your own lab environment that opens in the browser.
- How do lessons work?
- Each lesson has 8 to 10 steps and a short quiz. Early steps show the command to type, later steps give less help; if two attempts fail, the solution opens.
- Can I try it for free?
- Yes. The first three lessons of every course are free.