Charts are the language of business, used every day at all levels to convey information. But too often, they consist of incomprehensible pies, bars, gauges, dots, and lines, leaving the reader no more informed about the topic at hand. The good news is it\u2019s almost certainly not your fault \u2014 it\u2019s the charts themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019ve been helping people build better charts for 15 years, through my book, The Big Book of Dashboards<\/a>, on Chart Chat<\/a> (a video series about the good and bad of data visualisation), and at conferences around the world. I\u2019m a senior data evangelist at Salesforce\u2019s analytics platform Tableau<\/a>, and here\u2019s what I know: data visualisation is a language as expressive as the written word, a language that needs to be understood by all but often is not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m endlessly fascinated by the power of data to persuade or inform. Seemingly trivial choices such as colour or orientation can completely transform a chart\u2019s message. Check out this two-minute video for a perfect example of how a simple bar chart can be manipulated to tell two completely different stories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n