Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals

I have used this book for years as a go-to reference when I am designing visualizations that need to convey specific and targeted information effectively. It's a practical book, and easy to navigate quickly to sections that relate to what you are trying to accomplish. It's definitely worth reading through from the beginning, as a reminder of the importance of identifying audience and context before you design anything. I would recommend as a core reference book for anyone who has to regularly create visuals from data in order to get an audience into context so they can make informed decisions.

This is a must read for anyone creating data visualization. It provides clear, succinct examples and explains why one approach is better than other and is loaded with example visuals. This is a great reference for any person or data team to better enhance their storytelling with data. There aren’t enough encouraging words to express what a game changer this book is.

• Provides clear and insightful fundamentals for effective data visualization • Well adapted to real-world scenarios, helping beginners develop a constructive mindset for dashboard design • Particularly useful for structuring and communicating insights, though hands-on practice with messy, real-world data is still essential for exploration (eg. always prep raw data for users) • Overall, an excellent starting point for building a strong foundation in data visualization and analytical thinking

I am a university professor who teaches biostatistics and I find this to be one of the best books that bridges the gap between analytics and presentation. There are some excellent books around that show visualization (e.g., The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics: The Dos and Don'ts of Presenting Data, Facts, and Figures or books by Few Information Dashboard Design: Displaying Data for At-a-Glance Monitoring & Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten or Cairo The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication ) and there are good books on presentation (in particular I love Duarte's books Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences ) but this book is unique in how well it blends the two topics. I have never seen such an excellent presentation on how to build a series of graphics. That is, with books by Few or Cairo you will know how to make *a* great graphic and with advice from Duarte, you can connect with your audience but with this book you will see how to build a series of interrelated graphics that highlight different parts of a dataset. Most of the examples are spun around business but the examples are easy to extend to any field. While I think the author wrote this for people who do presentations in any quantitative field for a living, this book should be required reading for graduate students preparing to defend a dissertation or thesis.

This book gives both an overall framework for thinking about data visualization and a toolkit for designing the most common types of visualizations. Each type of visualization is presented with insights and practical tips. The book presents all of this material and detail concisely. Well worth a read and occasional review.

I work in the project controls arena of large projects that have hundreds, if not thousands of people working on them. A key requirement for project controls is to keep all project personnel informed about the project status. Needless to say engineering plays a major role on these projects and brings lots of data with them; pages and pages of it. As the author points out the analytical types are not necessarily trained on how to tell a story (i.e. communicate) with their data. For the last 10 years or so, I have developed methods for getting the project story down to a single graphic. It's usually a large graphic, but a single one. It has the effect of getting everyone on the same page. But for people who are not used to looking at this type of presentation, it can be overwhelming or as the author points out they have to work at it in order to understand it. This was a key point for me. Before I finished the book, I started making changes in my work products. They were small changes, but the feedback was very positive. One example, do you ever note information in page footers like date, time and maybe filename and path? Does anyone think to put them in the background by using a shade of gray instead of the default black? No! Try it. Then ask for opinions It doesn't sound like much, but it's reducing the competition on people's focus. This book is great! It's fairly short to read and has a lot of examples making it easy to follow the author's intent. She obviously is very good at her profession. If I had to pick one book as a recommendation to someone who wants to learn about making great presentation graphics, I will point to this book. I highly recommend it. But, the book doesn't stop there, the author has included a listing of resources (e.g. books and websites) for continued learning.

A guide for all business professionals. Easy to read and has great examples. 10/10 recommended.

If your job is to talk with people about numbers (any numbers: profit and loss, salary, election results, number of stars in the universe) then this book is for you. If you have created a chart to explain something, but not sure if people will understand what you're trying to tell them then this book is for you. If you work with Excel, Power BI or any other tool to visualize data, don't stop on readying books about ETL and Power Query, Excel formulas, data modeling and DAX. ETL, data modeling, formulas/calculations - all this steps you're doing for one reason - to make it possible and easy for you or other people to get useful insights from the data. To make data easy to understand, to extract useful insight you need to visualize the data. To visualize the data doesn't mean to drag&drop data fields onto a chart. It means to make meaningful visual representation of the data. And you need to read good books about data visualization to understand the concepts. And this is the first book to read. Easy to read book based on real life examples. This books will help you understand why colorful visualization is not the same as insightful visualization, why you need to think carefully about each line, each caption, each color on your data visualization. After reading this book you'll be crying looking at the thousands of colorful pie charts (with tens of similar size sectors colored using all possible colors) posted in the internet by people who know how to create a chart using a software, but don't understand (yet) what is the purpose of this data transformation into a visual object. Read the book, and make the world of data visualization better. If you need more practice, read another book of the same author - "Storytelling with Data: Let's Practice!". Cole is a great teacher of the science (and art) called data visualization.

i moderni strumenti informatici ci mettono a disposizione delle applicazioni molto interessanti per poter creare grafici e tabelle per la presentazione dei dati. Ma la cosa più importante da capire é come conformare questo grafici per fare in modo che il nostro interlocutore comprenda il senso del messaggio che si vuole trasmettere. Da questo punto di vista l’autrice ha le idee molto chiare e porta letteralmente per mano il lettore nelle varie strategie di conformazione dei dati per rendere evidente la parte realmente importante da trasmettere all’interlocutore. In un certo senso é come parlare di “Lean Method” per la comunicazione di grafici e dati. Un testo sicuramente illuminante ed istruttivo sull’argomento. Dopo averne letto i contenuti, se nella vostra attività vi troverete ad assistere a presentazioni di analisi di dati o, se dovrete farle voi, avrete sicuramente un approccio differente alla modalità di presentazione. Una lettura piacevole e molto chiara

Easy to follow, practical and useful data analytics knowledge.

Muito útil para quem lida com dados. Tudo muito simples... porem efetivo. Recomendo a leitura para todos que trabalham precisando comunicar coisas com dados.