Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten

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When the summary values are more important to your message or to your readers than the detail, it often makes sense to place them in a header. Graph design

Today everybody can produce reports of quantitative business information in the form of tables and graphs. But because doing it became so easy due to new technology, many of us forgot about mean purpose: to provide the reader with important, meaningful and useful insights. Amy suggests subscribing to e-zines that include inspirational data visualization like Flowing Data by Nathan Yau and Fair Warning by Sophie Warnes. When you see what’s possible, then you can apply that inspiration to your own projects. She also suggests joining the Data Visualization Society, which she helped start. This organization is collecting resources and establishing best practices around data visualization to help mature the industry as a whole. It is easy to combine multiple sets of quantitative data in a single graph when they all use the same unit of measures.If you are looking for practical, easy-to-follow guidelines for presenting numerical data, this is the best book there is. Stephen Few's examples are elegant, and his advice is right on the money." --Colin Ware, professor, University of New Hampshire, and author, Information Visualization: Perception for Design The strong visual nature of graphs requires a number of unique design practices. Always avoid 3-d and encode quantities to correspond accurately to the visual scale. You can only use two attributes of visual perception to reliably encode quantitative information: line length and 2-d position. Line length in the form of bars and 2-d position in the form of points and lines. Some information is so important that you should say it more than once and in more than one way. Recommendations for action are the best communicated in words.

Investing the time to create a really effective chart—especially if your company never had one before—can help stakeholders realize the value of good data design. As Amy noted, “You can’t expect people without much experience with data visualization to be able to imagine the value of data that hasn’t been viz-ed yet!” Preattentive processing is the early stage of visual perception that occurs below the level of consciousness at an extremely high speed and it tuned to detect a specific set of visual attributes. Collin Ware has organized preattentive attributes into four categories: In standard deviations we mostly use graphs called frequency polygon. It has something like a bell-shaped curve formally called a normal distribution. 68% of the values fall within one standard deviation above and below the mean, 95% fall within two standard deviations and 99,7% fall within three. This is called empirical rule.In September, Nancy Duarte—CEO of Duarte, Inc. and Guild Advisor—will publish her next book DataStory: Explain Data and Inspire Action Through Story. The Presentation Guild interviewed her about how to be accurate in the creative process of data storytelling: Access to data is vast. The bigger data gets, the more complicated forms of interactive visualizations are at our disposal. When it comes to communicating data, you want to choose the charts that make the insights from the data the clearest, not the coolest. After you plot the chart, highlight what’s important and overlay annotations to show what your conclusions are from the data.” Table terminology. The term body generally refers exclusively to the rectangular area that contains the quantitative values. Rows summarize information contained in preceding rows are called footers. These can be used to summarize the entire table, as in the diagram above or to summarize a subset of rows, which are called group footers. When a header spans multiple columns, it is called a spanner header. To enhance the data ink, you can subtract unnecessary data ink and emphasize the most important data ink. Some of the preattentive visual attributes used for emphasizing data ink: The Guild asked Amy Cesal, Community Director at Data Visualization Society, to share her point of view about creating a meaningful experience in data presentations:

The primary objective of visual design is to present content to your readers in a manner that high-lights what’s important. Show Me the Numbers is refreshingly practical. It offers sensible advice that you can apply directly to your work using modern tools and practices. Unlike some books that present unusual and pretty charts for unusual cases, Show Me the Numbers focuses on functional, effective visualization techniques that can be used in real-world scenarios. Insights: Wie Windows 11 und Intel vPro die Produktivität und Sicherheit in Unternehmen steigern können Fraenk Erfahrungen: Bis zu 55 GB mit App-basiertem Tarif der Telekom revolutioniert die Smartphone-NutzungDiscover the Art of Data Visualization with Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten