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

Book Description

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.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 The Building Blocks Of Data Visualization
Chapter 2 Visual Perception
Chapter 3 Beyond Visual Perception
Chapter 4 Data Preparation
Chapter 5 Data Visualization
Chapter 6 Data Discovery, Analysis, And Communication
Chapter 7 How To Choose A Chart
Chapter 8 A Sense Of Order
Chapter 9 Parts Of A Whole: Composition Charts
Chapter 10 Scattered Data
Chapter 11 Change Over Time
Chapter 12 Relationships
Chapter 13 Profiling
Chapter 14 Designing For Effectiveness
Chapter 15 Color: Beyond Aesthetics
Chapter 16 Conclusion

About The Author

Jorge Camões

Jorge Camões studied statistics and information management and has been consulting businesses on how to effectively use information visualizations since 2010, with clients in the top 25 pharma companies and major retailers. Prior to starting his consulting business, Camões worked for 10 years in the business intelligence department of the Portuguese subsidiary of Merck & Co. Camões runs the popular data visualization blog Excelcharts.com. He works from his home in Lisbon, Portugal.