It’s not a doubt that data is really very powerful, when you can actually understand what it’s telling you. It’s not easy to get clear insights by looking at numbers, stats and raw data.

You need data to be presented in a logical, easy to understand manner so that you can get proper information. That’s where the “Data Visualization” comes into picture.

Data Visualization is used plenty number of times in analytics industry and indeed good data visualizations gives a proper impact on your insights as well.

In this article we are going to learn about how data visualization is effective and see much more related stuffs about it.

What is Data Visualization?

Data Visualization allows you to understand your data in a better way which is easy to understand. It is all about representing your data in a visual manner through various types of charts, maps. diagrams, etc. It can help to give proper significance to your data.

How Data Visualization work?

Data is usually in raw format. Just by watching numbers you won’t understand anything. But a proper visual format will help people to extract meaning from that data and can be able to get quick information.

Data Visualizations allows you to expose patterns, trends, and correlations that may otherwise go undetected, too.

Best Practices for Data Visualizations

While determining how you will visualize your data, some of the best practices you have to keep in your mind are –

• Choose the visual which fits best for your data and it’s purpose.
• Ensure your visual is easily understandable and viewable.
• Make proper context arrangement with your visual so that everyone can understand.
• Keep it as simple and straightforward.
• Give proper insights through your visuals.

Questions to ask before deciding any visual for your data

Many times we don’t know which visual is to selected for what purpose. So this are some of the questions one can ask before selecting the proper visualization for their data.

Do you want to compare values?

When you want to compare the values of various columns of your data set you can use comparison chart visualizations. The can easily show the high and low trend in the data values.

Some of the visualization chart you can choose are –

• Column
• Line
• Mekko
• Bar
• Scatter
• Pie

Do want to represent the composition of something in the data?

Many visuals can show up how a individual category make up the whole of something. For example, total sales done by sales representative.

Some of the charts favoring this category are –

• Stacked Bar
• Stacked Column
• Area
• Waterfall
• Mekko
• Pie

Do you want to understand how your data is distributed?

Distribution charts can represent the distribution among the data and the range of information in your values.

Some of this charts are –

• Scatter Plot
• Line
• Column
• Bar

When you want to know the trends in your data set?

If you want to represent the time series data or want to know the information about a specific time period you can use the following charts.

• Line
• Dual – Axis Line
• Column

When you want to better understand the relationship between the value sets?

Relationship charts are suited to show how one variable related to other multiple variables. You can show positive relationship or negative relationship on another variable.

You can use the following charts to find the relationship between variables –

• Scatter plot
• Bubble chart
• Line chart

In the next article we will understand the dive deep into the theoretical part of each of the visualization and then into code.

Happy Learning !