Data at Work: Best practices for creating effective charts and information graphics in Microsoft® Excel®

5. Data Visualization

In Chapter 2, we imagined buying a data visualization book at a bookstore. But where was it shelved? Under Statistics? Graphic Design? Management Methods? Or Journalism, perhaps?

In theory, we could find a data visualization book on any of those shelves, and only the details of the actual book could help us choose the right shelf. However, you might have a preferred view of visualization that says a lot about your perspective. If you think visualization is simply graphic design with data, or even data art, you’ll disagree with someone else who believes visualization is nothing more than visual statistics. If you think eye-candy is needed to attract attention, this will be contrary to someone who believes attention comes ...