Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten

Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten by Stephen Few (Author). Most presentations of quantitative data are poorly designed-painfully so, usually to the point of misinformation. This downside, however, is never observed and even more hardly ever addressed. We use tables and graphs to communicate quantitative information: the critical numbers that measure the health, identify the opportunities, and forecast the way forward for our organizations. Even the perfect data is useless, however, if its story is poorly told. This problem exists because virtually nobody has ever been skilled to design tables and graphs for effective and environment friendly communication. Show Me the Numbers:

Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten is essentially the most accessible, practical, and complete guide to table and graph design available. The second edition of Show Me the Numbers improves on the first by polishing the content all through (including up to date figures) and including ninety one more pages of content, including: 1) A new preface; 2) A new chapter entitled "Foolish Graphs That Are Greatest Forsaken," which alerts readers to among the present misuses of graphs resembling donut charts, circle charts, unit charts, and funnel charts; 3) A new chapter about quantitative narrative entitled "Telling Compelling Tales with Numbers"; and four) New appendices entitled "Constructing Desk Lens Shows in Excel," "Setting up Box Plots in Excel," and "Useful Colour Palettes." Show Me the Numbers is a must learn for all BI professionals charged with designing reviews, dashboards, and speaking insights from data. He begins with the fundamentals on how our brains sift by means of pictures, what we deal with, what distracts us, and why.


There is a nice primer on totally different statistics, when to use a tabular information set versus a graph, and which charts are handiest for specific analyses. In contrast to many technical books in the marketplace as we speak, Few additionally has produced a high quality, colorful e book that additionally would make an amazing present! Okay, I will admit that I haven't learn "Present Me The Numbers" from cowl to cover, even though I've owned a duplicate (a signed copy!) for a few years. However it's not the kind of guide that requires this to get the worth from it. My area is organisational performance measurement, and I've seen countless examples of efficiency experiences that actually suck. They're ugly, they are cumbersome, the data is misrepresented and awkwardly displayed. It's near inconceivable to draw conclusions, and much more not possible to attract legitimate conclusions about what efficiency is doing, and why.

How are you going to make wise business choices with info fodder so poor? So Stephen's ebook is a gold mine of sensible statistical fundamentals to help us all - novices and experienced practitioners alike - to improve the best way we design and use tables and graphs to highlight relationships and patterns in knowledge like comparisons, traits and correlations. One in all my favourite parts of the e book is in chapter 7, "Common Design for Communication", the place Stephen lays out a wonderful framework for the way text can be utilized to assist tables and graphs to tell the story of the data. This framework is a wonderful checklist for how one can design the content of a performance report that can highlight, interpret, clarify and advocate responses to alerts in our performance measures.

 Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten 

 Stephen Few (Author)

 371 pages

Analytics Press; Second edition (June 1, 2012)

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