Skip to Main Content
Data at Work: Best practices for creating effective charts and information graphics in Microsoft® Excel®
book

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

by Jorge Camões
April 2016
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
448 pages
10h 40m
English
New Riders
Content preview from Data at Work: Best practices for creating effective charts and information graphics in Microsoft® Excel®

15. Color: Beyond Aesthetics

Avoid catastrophe. According to Edward Tufte, this is “the first principle” when using color in data visualization.1 Given the complexity contained in this warning, avoiding catastrophe is not an easy task to achieve.

1 Tufte, Edward. Envisioning Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1990.

Color is a complicated physiological phenomenon associated with symbolic, aesthetic, and emotional qualities. Each of these qualities is enough by itself to wreak havoc in data visualizations if not treated with care. Together, they make disaster almost inevitable and justify Tufte’s principle.

In an organizational environment, the talent of applying subtle color harmonies isn’t one of the most valued skills, as proven by the ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

The Big Picture: How to Use Data Visualization to Make Better Decisions—Faster

The Big Picture: How to Use Data Visualization to Make Better Decisions—Faster

Steve Wexler
Dashboards for Excel

Dashboards for Excel

Jordan Goldmeier, Purnachandra Duggirala

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780134268798Purchase book