
252 Applying Analytics: A Practical Introduction
going to touch o n a few select topics. For a comprehensive intro duction, the
best starting point is Tufte (200 1). His work certainly has influenced all the
advice I provide.
First, following Iliinsky and Steele (2011), I will distinguish between ex-
ploratory and explanatory data visualizations. An exploratory visualization
is
one that is used by the analyst to better understand the data. On the other
hand, explanatory visualizations
are used by an analys t to explain to an au-
dience something about the data. These two types of data visualizations have
very different functions, and therefore different