Simple Data Visualization

In one of my recent posts, I wrote about simplifying a wall of information into a distilled set of information that your audience needs to understand. It can be just showing a few columns instead of everything.

There’s another option for conveying information: visuals, more commonly called charts.

I helped out someone who wanted to convert a spreadsheet that was full of numbers into something where one could grasp the trends at a glance. Instead of digging through the numbers, you just see it. The issue was she didn’t know how to go about designing the “dashboard”, so she turned to me. In turn, I had to create something that she could handle; I had to leave off the gee whiz stuff largely because she would need to comfortably handle the spreadsheets.

Simple works.

The slide above is a tiny example of transforming a spreadsheet into some kind of simple dashboard. Instead of reading through the columns and rows of data, one can now look at the sample charts and divine the trends at a glance.

One of the things I don’t always do, largely because I run out of time, is try to see if I can illustrate the situation with charts. There is a trick though in choosing the right chart.

There is a site on LinkedIn (there is probably a web page too) that works on educating people on designing charts. It’s storytelling with data. Here’s the website.

See if you can level up your game by stimulating your readers’ interest through some kind of visual display of information. If you are using Excel, generally the best charts will be line or bar graphs or maybe some kind of histogram. I have done histograms; those are useful.

Converting pivot tables into pivot charts is a really easy way of changing tables into a visual. They are much easier to manipulate than the charts created from scratch.

Since the world is becoming more visual by the day, some form of data visualization just might put you ahead of the pack.