Visualizing Data Effectively
A chart is worth a thousand words, goes the old adage. Visual representation is often the preferred way to communicate numbers. As you can surely validate with your own experience, data charts are ubiquitous in business memos and presentations, as well as in newspaper articles and scientific papers. However, moving from data stored in a table to its graphic representation (a process called data visualization) is far from being trivial and risk-free. Although many software packages (including Power BI, Excel, KNIME, and so on) provide rapid ways to build charts in a matter of seconds, making effective and professional-looking visuals is far from being easy: it requires structured planning and disciplined execution.
This chapter will give you a set of practical guidelines to ensure that your business messages are communicated clearly through an effective data visualization process. In particular, we will go through the following questions:
- What...
