Storytelling With Data: A Data Visualization Guide For Business Professionals

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.

Content is well laid out with a lot of examples and the thought process behind the iterative changes that gets to the final polished result. I particularly liked the stress on general principles and guidelines, rather than very intricate details on how to visualize (I think that's what makes this book accessible to all). I am no beginner in this field (management consulting for a decade), but still had many lessons to learn. And lessons I had learnt the hard way reinforced with a good narrative on how to teach the same to others. The only thing I would have liked to be covered too, is the trade-offs you have to make in visual design in dashboards/reports to balance story telling with ease of regular report generation. Although the story telling principles within the book hold true for a report too, would have still loved that subject to be touched upon for more guidance. Overall a very pleasing book, and really happy with the purchase!

It’s a really informative and easy read, feel like a comic book to me. It even discusses ethical visualisation, talk about comprehensive!