We can't just start directly with data visualization, unless we understand our environment and its needs. To understand our environment, we have to realize who are our users, what they need to do to access the report, and how they will use the data for appropriate business decisions.
If we want to make a good looking report, we need to have our data. And all the technologies that we'll see in the chapter will work on a similar concept. At first, we need to define a data source or a query for accessing our data, on which we'll make the visualizations to represent the data in a more understandable format.