A succinct and highly readable guide to creating effective graphs The right graph can be a powerful tool for communicating information, improving a presentation, or conveying your point in print. If your professional endeavors call for you to present data graphically, here's a book that can help you do it more effectively. Creating More Effective Graphs gives you the basic knowledge and techniques required to choose and create appropriate graphs for a broad range of applications. Using real-world examples everyone can relate to, the author draws on her years of experience in graphical data analysis and presentation to highlight some of today's most effective methods. In clear, concise language, the author answers such common questions as: What constitutes an effective graph for communicating data? How do I choose the type of graph that is best for my data? How do I recognize a misleading graph? Why do some graphs have logarithmic scales? In no time you'll graduate from bar graphs and pie charts to graphs that illuminate data like: Dot plots Box plots Scatterplots Linked micromaps Trellis displays Mosaic plots Month plots Scatterplot matrices . . . most of them requiring only inexpensive, easily downloadable software. Whether you're a novice at graphing or already use graphs in your work but want to improve them, Creating More Effective Graphs will help you develop the kind of clear, accurate, and well-designed graphs that will allow your data to be understood.

Now more than ever, content must be visual if it is to travel far. Readers everywhere are overwhelmed with a flow of data, news, and text. Visuals can cut through the noise and make it easier for readers to recognize and recall information. Yet many researchers were never taught how to present their work visually. This book details essential strategies to create more effective data visualizations. Jonathan Schwabish walks readers through the steps of creating better graphs and how to move beyond simple line, bar, and pie charts. Through more than five hundred examples, he demonstrates the do’s and don’ts of data visualization, the principles of visual perception, and how to make subjective style decisions around a chart’s design. Schwabish surveys more than eighty visualization types, from histograms to horizon charts, ridgeline plots to choropleth maps, and explains how each has its place in the visual toolkit. It might seem intimidating, but everyone can learn how to create compelling, effective data visualizations. This book will guide you as you define your audience and goals, choose the graph that best fits for your data, and clearly communicate your message.

Don't simply show your data—tell a story with it! Storytelling with Data teaches you the fundamentals of data visualization and how to communicate effectively with data. You'll discover the power of storytelling and the way to make data a pivotal point in your story. The lessons in this illuminative text are grounded in theory, but made accessible through numerous real-world examples—ready for immediate application to your next graph or presentation. Storytelling is not an inherent skill, especially when it comes to data visualization, and the tools at our disposal don't make it any easier. This book demonstrates how to go beyond conventional tools to reach the root of your data, and how to use your data to create an engaging, informative, compelling story. Specifically, you'll learn how to: Understand the importance of context and audience Determine the appropriate type of graph for your situation Recognize and eliminate the clutter clouding your information Direct your audience's attention to the most important parts of your data Think like a designer and utilize concepts of design in data visualization Leverage the power of storytelling to help your message resonate with your audience Together, the lessons in this book will help you turn your data into high impact visual stories that stick with your audience. Rid your world of ineffective graphs, one exploding 3D pie chart at a time. There is a story in your data—Storytelling with Data will give you the skills and power to tell it!

Dataviz—the new language of business A good visualization can communicate the nature and potential impact of information and ideas more powerfully than any other form of communication. For a long time “dataviz” was left to specialists—data scientists and professional designers. No longer. A new generation of tools and massive amounts of available data make it easy for anyone to create visualizations that communicate ideas far more effectively than generic spreadsheet charts ever could. What’s more, building good charts is quickly becoming a need-to-have skill for managers. If you’re not doing it, other managers are, and they’re getting noticed for it and getting credit for contributing to your company’s success. In Good Charts, dataviz maven Scott Berinato provides an essential guide to how visualization works and how to use this new language to impress and persuade. Dataviz today is where spreadsheets and word processors were in the early 1980s—on the cusp of changing how we work. Berinato lays out a system for thinking visually and building better charts through a process of talking, sketching, and prototyping. This book is much more than a set of static rules for making visualizations. It taps into both well-established and cutting-edge research in visual perception and neuroscience, as well as the emerging field of visualization science, to explore why good charts (and bad ones) create “feelings behind our eyes.” Along the way, Berinato also includes many engaging vignettes of dataviz pros, illustrating the ideas in practice. Good Charts will help you turn plain, uninspiring charts that merely present information into smart, effective visualizations that powerfully convey ideas.

An accessible primer on how to create effective graphics from data This book provides students and researchers a hands-on introduction to the principles and practice of data visualization. It explains what makes some graphs succeed while others fail, how to make high-quality figures from data using powerful and reproducible methods, and how to think about data visualization in an honest and effective way. Data Visualization builds the reader’s expertise in ggplot2, a versatile visualization library for the R programming language. Through a series of worked examples, this accessible primer then demonstrates how to create plots piece by piece, beginning with summaries of single variables and moving on to more complex graphics. Topics include plotting continuous and categorical variables; layering information on graphics; producing effective “small multiple” plots; grouping, summarizing, and transforming data for plotting; creating maps; working with the output of statistical models; and refining plots to make them more comprehensible. Effective graphics are essential to communicating ideas and a great way to better understand data. This book provides the practical skills students and practitioners need to visualize quantitative data and get the most out of their research findings. Provides hands-on instruction using R and ggplot2 Shows how the “tidyverse” of data analysis tools makes working with R easier and more consistent Includes a library of data sets, code, and functions

NOW IN FULL COLOR! Written by sought-after speaker, designer, and researcher Stephanie D. H. Evergreen, Effective Data Visualization shows readers how to create Excel charts and graphs that best communicate their data findings. This comprehensive how-to guide functions as a set of blueprints—supported by both research and the author’s extensive experience with clients in industries all over the world—for conveying data in an impactful way. Delivered in Evergreen’s humorous and approachable style, the book covers the spectrum of graph types available beyond the default options, how to determine which one most appropriately fits specific data stories, and easy steps for building the chosen graph in Excel. Now in full color with new examples throughout, the Second Edition includes a revamped chapter on qualitative data, nine new quantitative graph types, new shortcuts in Excel, and an entirely new chapter on Sharing Your Data With the World, which provides advice on using dashboards. New from Stephanie Evergreen! The Data Visualization Sketchbook provides advice on getting started with sketching and offers tips, guidance, and completed sample sketches for a number of reporting formats. Bundle Effective Data Visualization, 2e, and The Data Visualization Sketchbook, using ISBN 978-1-5443-7178-8!

Information visualization is a language. Like any language, it can be used for multiple purposes. A poem, a novel, and an essay all share the same language, but each one has its own set of rules. The same is true with information visualization: a product manager, statistician, and graphic designer each approach visualization from different perspectives. Data at Work was written with you, the spreadsheet user, in mind. This book will teach you how to think about and organize data in ways that directly relate to your work, using the skills you already have. In other words, you don’t need to be a graphic designer to create functional, elegant charts: this book will show you how. Although all of the examples in this book were created in Microsoft Excel, this is not a book about how to use Excel. Data at Work will help you to know which type of chart to use and how to format it, regardless of which spreadsheet application you use and whether or not you have any design experience. In this book, you’ll learn how to extract, clean, and transform data; sort data points to identify patterns and detect outliers; and understand how and when to use a variety of data visualizations including bar charts, slope charts, strip charts, scatter plots, bubble charts, boxplots, and more. Because this book is not a manual, it never specifies the steps required to make a chart, but the relevant charts will be available online for you to download, with brief explanations of how they were created.

Sanjay Matange and Dan Heath's Statistical Graphics Procedures by Example: Effective Graphs Using SAS shows the innumerable capabilities of SAS Statistical Graphics (SG) procedures. The authors begin with a general discussion of the principles of effective graphics, ODS Graphics, and the SG procedures. They then move on to show examples of the procedures' many features. The book is designed so that you can easily flip through it, find the graph you need, and view the code right next to the example. Among the topics included are how to combine plot statements to create custom graphs; customizing graph axes, legends, and insets; advanced features, such as annotation and attribute maps; tips and tricks for creating the optimal graph for the intended usage; real-world examples from the health and life sciences domain; and ODS styles. The procedures in Statistical Graphics Procedures by Example are specifically designed for the creation of analytical graphs. That makes this book a must-read for analysts and statisticians in the health care, clinical trials, financial, and insurance industries. However, you will find that the examples here apply to all fields. This book is part of the SAS Press program.

This book introduces the technique and art of producing good charts. Carefully written with many examples and illustrations, the book begins with an introduction to the building blocks of charts (axes, scales and patterns) and then describes each step involved in creating effective and easy-to-read charts.

An integrated introduction to data visualization, strategic communication, and delivery best practices. Persuading with Data provides an integrated instructional guide to data visualization, strategic communication, and delivery best practices. Most books on data visualization focus on creating good graphs. This is the first book that combines both explanatory visualization and communication strategy, showing how to use visuals to create effective communications that convince an audience to accept and act on the data. In four parts that proceed from micro to macro, the book explains how our brains make sense of graphs; how to design effective graphs and slides that support your ideas; how to organize those ideas into a compelling presentation; and how to deliver and defend data to an audience. Persuading with Data is for anyone who has to explain analytical results to others. It synthesizes a wide range of skills needed by modern data professionals, providing a complete toolkit for creating effective business communications. Readers will learn how to simplify in order to amplify, how to communicate data analysis, how to prepare for audience resistance, and much more. The book integrates practitioner and academic perspectives with real-world examples from a variety of industries, organizations, and disciplines. It is accessible to a wide range of readers—from undergraduates to mid-career and executive-level professionals—and has been tested in settings that include academic classes and workplace training sessions.