Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten

Product Information

Mode and midrange – mode is the most often value in the set of values, midrange in the midway value between the highest and lowest values in a set of values.

Through her new book, Nancy shows content professionals how to move from “numbers into narratives.” This will enable them to explain data in a way that drives action in their audience. urn:lcp:showmenumbersdes0000fews:epub:9fce1801-6cf1-4eb8-bb44-6040b6d4363b Foldoutcount 0 Identifier showmenumbersdes0000fews Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s24k6stn222 Invoice 1652 Isbn 9780970601995If 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 Lines is by definition always straight. If it is not, it is a curve. Lines are used to: connect individual points and display the trend of a series of data points.

The book starts with the basics, explaining the types of data and which tables or graphs are best for communicating them. But it doesn’t stop there. It builds on these insights by delving into more creative elements of data visualization. The beauty of this book is its broad appeal – it’s as accessible to beginners as it is enlightening to seasoned data professionals. Formatting text can be about orientation and alignment. Numbers that represent quantitative values, as opposed to those that are merely identifiers, should always be aligned to the right. Dates are best aligned to the left, using a format that keeps the number of characters in each portion of the date. Text that expresses neither numbers nor dates works best when aligned to the left. Use same number of decimal digits. And align both the decimal point and the final digit to the right. When you want to convey quantitative information that consist of one or two number do it in written language. There is elegance in simplicity. Quantitative values are numbers. Categories identify what the quantitative values measure. Sometimes numbers simply categorize information and have no quantitative meaning. A graph is a method for displaying quantitative information that exhibits the following characteristic: I think templates are useful when creating a bunch of graphics and for maintaining consistency. I’ve even created a number of data visualization style guides to help create consistency among charts and graphs. But charts and graphs should look like a family of visuals not identical twins. It’s hard to see the uniqueness of the data and figure out the meaning of the chart if everything is visually identical.

Previous Results

The most common attribute used to identify categorical subdivisions is position. Second is color. Fill pattern are only used when bars are used.

Show Me the Numbers is a master class in the principles and practices of data visualization. It’s an ideal guide for anyone involved in communicating with numbers – whether you’re a business professional, analyst, researcher, or student. And if you’re a fan of Teach Yourself VISUALLY Power BI, you’ll find Show Me the Numbers a complementary read. Gleaning Insights from Data 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.”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. We can distinguish preattentively between no more than eight different hues, about four different orientations and about four different sizes and all the other visual attributes should be limited to less than 10. Preattentive processing generally cannot handle more than one visual attribute of an object at a time.

Additionally, different tools have different uses and features. An organization or presenter might need to use several different ones depending on the data and analyses they are conducting. If we rely on only built-in templates, our outputs look like the tool that created. You can often spot an Excel or Tableau chart by sight. These tools are immensely useful, but the end goal should be to produce cohesive, branded visuals across the full suite of content produced by the organization, and this often requires more than built-in templates. Third group: 9 high school students. They paid more attention to the fact that different families were represented. They were more focused on the “movement” but weren’t able to compare units sold by family. Color is made up of three separate attributes: hue (red, green, blue, …), saturation and lightness (both intensity features). Our eyes jump to the next point of fixation in ¼ of a second. It is called saccadic eye movement. We don’t see images with our eyes; we see them with our brains. We have three types of memories: buffer memory, working memory and permanent memory. They are analogous to three types of memory that process visual information in our brains: Categorical subdivision can also relate to one another by virtue of the quantitative values associated with them: ranking, ratio, correlation.A necessary book for those that are presenting and are concerned with the designs used for graphs, and tables. In other words, if you are a professor or involved in delivering reports to the management or public audiences it is a very useful resource. The book in a very detailed and sometimes even academic style explains the type of data, tables, graphs, designs, fonts, colours, patterns etc. used for presenting info to various audiences. It contains tons of examples, and every error in tables and graphs is shown and explained why it is a bad idea to use it. The book can be used as well for learning and testing your skills in this area by providing exercises and tests where you can see if you understood and are ready to apply the stuff you just read. A truly useful tool from the author that also helped Hans Rosling with his TED talk and presentation with the animated bubbles presenting advanced statistical data in time - the penultimate chapter is my favorite and is focusing on presenting animated data.