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15 Data Visualization tips you need to know to make Effective Charts

There are many great resources available that offer tips on effective design for data visualization. But who has time to search various articles, websites, and research articles for useful tricks and hidden gems? We want to help you create great graphics right now, so we’ve put together this list of quick tips for you to consider when creating your next presentation.


15 quick data visualization tips
1. Before you start designing your board, stop to think about your story. What are you trying to say? Once you understand your message, the process is much easier.

2. Keep it simple. If it doesn’t support your story, leave it out. You don’t want to saturate your boxes with unnecessary text, colors, drop shadows, or 3D images.


3. Give your painting a strong title that clearly frames your message. Great titles make graphics more memorable and helpful.


4. Scale your board appropriately. Always take care that the scale you use on each axis must have equal intervals. This is a quick way to make sure your chart is displaying correctly.


5. Choose a font for your title, axes and legends labels that are easy to read. You want people to connect to your message quickly.
6. For the sake of transparency, always quote your sources. This builds credibility, builds trust, and gives your readers the opportunity to visit the source for more information.


7. Organize your data logically. Carefully arrange all columns and bars in order by value to make them more easy to compare at a glance.
8. Use color to draw attention to a specific part of your graphic. Bright colors quickly attract attention, helping to get the message across faster especially when you’re working on map visualization.


9. Avoid making rainbows or using mixed color palettes. They may be pretty, but they are not necessarily effective. We suggest that you choose a color for the whole picture or use a touch of color to highlight the important areas in the map visualization or visualization through graphs.


10. Do not select the data you choose to view. While you may have impressive numbers to share, you should give context and tell the full story.


11. Label your data directly, so you can make your table easier to understand quickly. Put labels next to the corresponding lines or bars if a legend takes too long to read.


12. Grid lines should be used only if they make your data easier to read. Play around with vertical and horizontal grid lines until you feel your frame is clear and concise.


13. Always use company colors, fonts, and branding when presenting data internally. This makes your graphics look polished and professional.


14. Try to avoid using pie charts to make comparisons. Pie charts are difficult to compare at a glance; it is best to use bar or column tables.


15. It’s easy to get lost in a visualization when you try to do it right. Give it to a friend or colleague to see if they can understand your message in 30 seconds or less.

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Why Use Data Visualization in Communication

Data Visualization tool

Today all companies have data. The term Big data is already mastered in most companies and they know the importance of collecting information.

However, the main flaw that makes it impossible to extract the full potential of the data comes right after it is collected: analysis. And is that the real challenge of Big data is in the interpretation of data.To facilitate this process and to be able to display the information in a simple and understandable way, data visualization tools have been created.

These tools collect all the company’s databases and display them on a single platform, allowing the team to carry out a cross-sectional analysis.

To extract knowledge and transmit messages with the data, we need to have a good data visualization tool that supports and facilitates our analysis.

What Does A Data Visualization Tool Do

To understand in a simpler way how a data visualization tool works, we will explain it:We have a platform where all kinds of databases can be connected. On this platform, we can load data manually and automatically.

Manually, we will make the loads through Excel, CSV, JSON or HTML documents for example. Loading this data over time can be facilitated by sending the databases to the platform by email.The connections that are made automatically can be several. For example, if the visualization tool has developed the connectors, we can connect via API with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google or Adobe Analytics …


Connections can also be made through SAS, Google Big Query or Hadoop. Unlike a DMP, a data visualization tool cannot activate other tools, that is, it does not have the capacity to make a call to the server of our Email Marketing platform to execute any action. It just collects the information and displays it. Although, in recent months, some of these platforms are starting to move towards the activation field.


What Is It Used for in Communication?

The Data Visualization gurus says that the data visualization platform collects the databases, previously labelled with business areas, reputation dimensions or company objectives.
For what? So that the impact of internal efforts can be measured, to have traceability of press releases in all media, to measure the effectiveness of each of the actions of the different campaigns.


It is the best way to control the objectives of the department and the company, to observe the real situation of the actions, the status of the reputation and the effectiveness of our communications.

1) It allows to have a vision of what happens in all the communications of the company. Furthermore, the platform is interactive and usable. It is easy to extract knowledge from graphs.

2) It is an ideal tool for communication since in this business area there has never been a spirit of measurement. However, metrics are already required from all departments and this is an easy way to carry them out.

3)  It has the advantage that all the information comes from the same data source that can be consulted by other departments involved. This guarantees that the data is consistent and there are no inconsistencies in the results of one or another department.

4) It allows metrics and cross-sectional dimensions to be used in all databases, matching them to be able to analyse them together.

Key to Keep in Mind

First of all, for a d3 expert tool to be useful to you, your data needs to be consistent. In other words, you have to have data volume and reliability. The data collection methodology must be consistent across all databases.

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The Heat Map that reveals how Google watches you: it knows where you have been every day

Using Google’s terrifying location history data visualization, able to tell you exactly where you’ve been every day, a developer in the US creates a tool to visualize your movements on a terrifying heat map. Google maps watches over you. With your permission, those of Mountain View use your smartphone to control each and every one of your steps. For what?
Well, initially to introduce you to you later in a terrifying location history. You can check it here and, if you haven’t seen it until now, you’re going to be scared: Google knows exactly where you’ve been.

Now, an American developer has created a tool to visualize all that data in a different way. Specifically, with a heat map that would replace the lines of your routes that Google puts on the map.The platform uses the data from your history, but rest assured, your locations do not leave your computer, which is where the heat map is actually created.
To create your own heat map with this tool, you have to access Google Takeout to download the file containing your location history from there.

Finally, you just have to drag the file you have downloaded to the web, which will create a heat map with the places you’ve been to lately. A perfect way to visualize where you spend the most time and to verify that Google knows everything (or almost everything) about you.

For more information or any query, you can contact us : info@datavisualizationgurus.com

Posted on by datavisualizationgurus

Why Will Companies Continue to Invest in Visualization?

Data visualization has become one of the most popular tools in data- driven business management in recent years. As Business Intelligence software becomes a more central part of business data practices and toolkit, visualizations have improved and at the same time become more accurate and versatile.

Cannot be Neglected

Even with these, not all cases of a company that implements BI and data visualization software is successful. Although they are intended to simplify analysis and understanding of the data, they can sometimes do just the opposite.

A survey reveals that the despite their best intentions, many companies confuse their data visualization implementations and end up with more harm than good. While this has not affected the popularity of BI and data visualization, it does raise some interesting questions about what companies can do.

The survey outlined above shown that while many have been successful in their data visualization deployment strategies, most have only had some of this success, or have not yet seen benefits from it.

Why does it sometimes fail?
Survey responses show that while Dashboards are still being used and developed, the number of companies that are experiencing great success thanks to them has decreased. When asked about the overall effectiveness of their data dashboard strategies, only 43% of them describe it as somewhat successful. 54% rate it as a bit successful and 3% were unsuccessful in implementation.

One of the biggest challenge advantage of dashboards is that they provide only the data that is sometimes go wrong and become chaotic, hiding important information.

Why will companies continue to invest in visualization?
A big reason many companies undergo less-than-optimal deployments is that they don’t have an effective answer to the questions of what is data visualization. They do not know what it is. For many, the definition is as simple as charts made on spreadsheets and basic diagrams. However, information easier to understand and process.

The importance of graphics

Another report from the American Management Association finds that visualization tends to improve various aspects of business decisions making. According to AMA, 64% of participants made decisions faster using a visualization tool such as charts.js, AM charts and map visualization while another found that visual language can shorten meetings by up to 24%.

More importantly, the AMA report cites additional third party studies showing that visual language helps solve problems, improving efficiency by 19% while overall producing 22% more results in 13% less time. Taking all this into account, the first of the reports that we showed you is quite worrying for some companies, since the precision and design cannot be overstated when planning a data visualization strategy.

In some cases, focusing on a specific type of visualization can misrepresent the data or make it difficult to understand. Having a clear implementation strategy that understand a company’s specific needs and objectives can also facilitate this process. The report shows that companies that focus on goals that are more important than those that are more challenging can also help organizations increase their success.