Data Visualization Tips and Tricks

Introduction

• The tips and tricks to data visualization
• What you should know
• Exercise files

1. The Rules of Effective Data Visualization

• Why visualize data?
• What kind of visualization should you make?

2. Comparing Data Sets

• Visualize comparisons in data
• Bar charts across categories
• Line charts over time
• Sparklines for important events
• Gantt charts and time difference
• Treemaps for long tail data
• Highlight tables and heat maps
• Slope charts for changes between dates
• Optimize dashboard layout with small multiples

3. Data Relationships

• Visualize relationships in data
• Compare multiple variables within scatter plots

4. Distributions with Your Dataset

• Visualize data distributions
• Histograms for a single measure
• Box plots for multiple dimensions

5. Compositions of Data

• Visualize data composition
• Improve the use of pie charts
• Stacked bar charts
• 100% stacked bars
• Stacked area chart
• 100% stacked area chart

6. Geographic Data

• Visualize geographic data
• When to map geographic data
• Compare filled maps and symbol maps
• Alternative techniques with tilemaps

Conclusion

• Next steps for more data visualization