Where to Go from Here - Data Points: Visualization That Means Something - page 620

Now that you've learned about data, how to represent it, explore it visually,
enhance clarity, and design for an audience, the obvious next step is to put
it into practice. Grab your data and visualize.

Visualize with what though? There are lots of tools at your disposal. The one
that's best for you depends on your data and what you want to do with it, but
most likely it'll be some combination of the ones in this chapter. Some are good
for quick looks at your data, whereas others are better for wider audiences.

VISUALIZATION TOOLS

There are two main groups of visualization solutions: nonprogrammatic and
programmatic. The offerings for the former used to be restricted to a handful
of programs, but as data resources grow, more click-and-drag tools spring up
to help you understand your data.

MICROSOFT EXCEL

The familiar spreadsheet software is universal and has been around for decades.
Heck, the first time I used Excel was a couple of decades ago, and I still use it
sometimes, if only because a lot of data is made available as an Excel spread-
sheet. It's easy to highlight columns and make a few charts, so you can get a
quick idea of what your data looks like.

Note: If you use Excel for the entire visualiza-
tion process, work with chart settings to improve
clarity. Default settings rarely fit the bill.

That said, I wouldn't use Excel for thorough analysis or graph-
ics made for publication. It's limited by the amount of data
it can handle at once, and unless you know Visual Basic for
Applications (VBA), the programming language built in to Excel,
it can be a chore to reproduce charts for different datasets.

GOOGLE SPREADSHEETS

This is essentially Google's version of Microsoft Excel, but it's simpler and online.
Figure 7-1 shows some of the charting options, but the online feature is the
main plus because you can quickly access your data across different machines
and devices, and you can collaborate via built-in chat and real-time editing.

You can also import HTML and XML files from the web using the importHTML and
importXML functions, respectively, which is the main thing I use the application