Visualization: A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Numbers

Visualization (or visualization in some places) is one of the hottest topics around lately.  In fact, I just Googled both spellings and got 191 million hits for the American spelling with a “z”) and 43.4 million hits for the British spelling!

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:
“Visualization (or visualisation) is any technique for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message. Visualization through visual imagery has been an effective way to communicate both abstract and concrete ideas since the dawn of humanity. Examples from history include cave paintings, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Greek geometry, and Leonardo da Vinci‘s revolutionary methods of technical drawing for engineering and scientific purposes.”

In this current era of Big Data, Analytics and all things data-related it is very easy to confuse your audience rather than inform them.  Fortunately, CPG Data Tip Sheet has published several handy posts on the most useful kinds of visualizations (formerly known as “graphs”), along with use cases for each one (formerly known as “examples of when to use”).

• The Pie chart is used to show shares, things that add up to 100%. (The Donut chart has replaced this in many uses but we are still partial to the good old pie.)
• The Line chart is used to show trends over time.
• The Bar chart is probably the most commonly used and can be shown vertically or horizontally.
• The Stacked Bar chart is related to the Pie chart and show two different things that add up to 100% on the same graph.  It’s hard to compare one pie chart to another so a stacked bar is often the better choice when analyzing share change over time or when comparing one measure of share to another.

And just for fun, click here for some clever visualizations related to…the movies!

Is your favorite graph type missing from this post?  Feel free to give it a shout-out and why you like it in the comments below.

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