7

Designing Dashboards and Reports

Everyone has probably heard the phrase a picture is worth a thousand words. But what if you can’t interpret that picture? What if you don’t know what you’re looking at? We were all exposed to charts, infographics, and other visual aids, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, and we’ve all seen how crucial data has become. We all witnessed visualizations that were made, some of which were even worse than before. Nobody benefits from poor visualizations or visuals that are difficult to interpret.

Charts can deceive us, and charts can lie in a variety of ways, such as giving us wrong or insufficient numbers, weird patterns, and so on. We recently witnessed a politician exhibit a single line graph on a piece ...

Get Data Literacy in Practice now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.