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

6. Data Discovery, Analysis, and Communication

In the 1980s, change really started to accelerate, so that by the early 21st century, the simple and easy-to-understand bipolar world of the Cold War had been replaced by a foggy multipolar world of newspeak and fluid military and political alliances. Other well-defined polarities started to crack too. Technology blurred the divide between producers and consumers, TV networks and their audience, and mainframes and dumb terminals. Our world has become increasingly complex.

More complexity implies more variation, and more variation implies the need for more data, as any sampling methods handbook will tell you. However, at some point just adding more data will not be enough. We’ll need better data, ...