Freakalytics^™

Why don’t you just show me the numbers?

• Poor presentation of data can make informative interpretation difficult or even impossible.
• We spend years diagramming sentences & solving equations but have minimal exposure to telling stories with data!
• The ability to explore, understand and utilize real-world data is a rare skill that can dramatically improve your organization and career.

Sample revenue data from a university

College	Quarter	Total Revenue	Tuition	Research	Plan Revenue
Arts	2009-01	$5,510,268	$5,230,198	$280,070	$6,000,000
Design	2009-01	$703,770	$408,762	$295,008	$680,000
Engineering	2009-01	$25,139,083	$6,201,932	$18,937,151	$26,800,000
Sciences	2009-01	$4,439,991	$2,159,010	$2,280,981	$4,400,000

A prickly example – Excel chart defaults

Excel defaults are looking sharp, yet uninformative.

Perhaps I should “kick it up a notch”?

Just a few more tweaks in Excel to achieve this very colorful yet nearly useless chart.

Graph the data effectively in Tableau

Tableau provides intelligent defaults based on sound principles of good design.

In this view, I can see that the larger colleges, Arts and Engineering, are the worst performers against the revenue plan. I can also see that the smallest college, Design, is exceeding our revenue plan.

While the Arts College tuition revenue is more than double the Sciences College, the research revenue from the Sciences is ahead of the Arts but still well behind Engineering. The net result is that the Engineering College generates most of our revenue, with the Arts College being slightly larger than the Sciences and the Design College lagging far behind the Sciences.

Adapted from Stephen Few, “Show Me the Numbers” with examples and commentary by Freakalytics, LLC.

Tags:   Analyst · Books · Data Tables · Graphs · Principles · Tableau · Tools · TrainingNo Comments

Posted on May 19th, 2009 by Stephen McDaniel