So, you’ve been working on a data set, be it a relatively short table of experimental results or an almost-impossible to describe excel composed of multiple fields and countless rows. Now, you need to share your findings in a report or presentation. While you could copy the raw data into your output, that would likely be difficult and unpleasant to read and digest. A better way to show off the relationships and insights you discovered is via a chart summarising the data. The old saying is that a picture is worth a thousand words but did you know that 90% of the information processed by the brain is visual? With that in mind, let’s get into the different types of visualisations available and when to use them.
“Effective data visualization can mean the difference between success and failure when it comes to communicating the findings of your study, raising money for your nonprofit, presenting to your board, or simply getting your point across to your audience.”
Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic In her book Storytelling with Data
The first question you need to consider is, what is the goal of this chart? What do you aim to achieve or communicate? Keeping that in mind, the charts we are discussing today can be grouped by communication goal.
Inform: convey a single important message or data point that doesn’t require much context to understand
Compare: show similarities or differences among values or parts of a whole
Reveal Relationships: show correlations among variables or values
Once you decide on the goal, you can consider your options.
How do we highlight the key info
When to use:
When to use:
When to use:
How do we compare categories or show how items are broken down
When to use :
When to use:
When to use:
How has the data varied over time or against another variable
When to use:
When to use:
When to use:
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Hopefully, after reading this you have a better understanding of your data visualisation options and when to use them. Keep learning! This is a non-exhaustive list and there are other options available to you. Also, software such as Power BI and Tableau are a great resource to level up your data visualisations and make interactive views. More on those to come x