Use Data Viz. But – what exactly is it?
Data Viz, short for Data Visualization is a doctrine that shows the data in a visual form.
Actually, data viz existed in a way – from the dawn of history, even when it was not called that.
Think of drawings on Cave walls, showing a number of the detected surrounding predators. Or better yet, think about Maps. They take a lot of data – and show it as a visual form. Instead of saying “USA’s size is XXX Km2 (well, miles …) and the is located in the northern hemisphere, bordering Canada in the north and Mexico in the south, between XX-YY longitude and ZZ-AA Latitude” etc. etc.
When you look at a map you see all of this information at a glance.
Now, think of a very complexed excel sheet, with 15,000 rows and 10 columns.
Can you say anything about what you see?
Can anybody else understand what is going on on this sheet?
The only way to convey this information is by summing it up and arrange it in a way that we can draw some conclusions. Still – can we treat this summed data as a map?
The following article, I wrote a few years back, was published on the PresentationGuru website – will walk you through the process.