Rethinking your data

In this task, we'll show you what most people do to visualize data and why that doesn't work.

Prepare for lift off

To have data to work with, we put some financial and user data in an Excel sheet.

Engage thrusters

Data usually consists of lots and lots of numbers. You wouldn't be able to understand the data in one glance. You have to analyze the data, combine it, and compare it. You have to look for the differences and similarities.

A lot of people find this very difficult and if you have to do it during a presentation, it's even worse. The data might not be boring at all, but the way of presenting is boring because it's too hard to find out what those numbers mean. Consider the following screenshot:

Numbers are boring. That's why people often use graphs. Graphs come in many styles such as line charts and bar charts.

With Excel, it's very easy to convert a table with data into a nice graph. The next two images represent sales volumes of 2012. The second graph also includes...