Communicating with Data

Chapter 3. Visualizing Data

In the first two chapters, you gained the fundamental knowledge we’ll build upon for the rest of the book. In this chapter, we are going to look at the key to all data communications: the charts themselves.

Presenting data in the form of visualizations is a powerful and clear way to show your audience the story hidden within the data points. When you use charts correctly, your audience will easily receive the message you are sending to them. If your charts create ambiguity, your users are going to spend more time trying to decode the chart than thinking about the message you were trying to convey!

I am lucky enough to spend my work life teaching people how to turn the data sets all around them into analytical outputs. In many organizations, data sets are so big and unruly that sharing the stories within the data can be difficult—assuming you can find them. However, when analyzed well, this wealth of data can be a competitive advantage or challenge an organization’s ways of thinking, which can lead to creating operational savings or new revenue sources.

How can you make sure the benefits of your analytical findings outweigh the effort of finding them? Much of this challenge has to do with the way you communicate your findings. In this chapter, we’ll explore simple visualization techniques that will make this communication much easier and more effective.

When I first worked with data in Excel, I ran headfirst into this challenge. I was in my first managerial ...