One chart isn't enough? Just add more! We've had dashboards for years now, and there are lots of different software programs that give you fancy ways to create them. They show you in a straightforward sense what's happening with your data- Sales are increasing, weight is decreasing, these are the categories with the highest percentages, these are the places with the oldest populations, ect., and that's really helpful! But what if you want to know why? What if your “why” lived in the details of your data set and not just the aggregate? Insert the creation of the dashboard. Charts and graphs do precisely what we want them to… for the most part.
You may be asking, why do we need a new way to look at data? Or saying if it ain’t broke don’t fix it- and there’s validity in that. But there has been no real revolution of how we look at data since its inception. We’ve seen many evolutions of how we create these types of graphs- think, color coding, some minor 3D, heat-maps, box plots, time series line charts, etc. To shorten a very long story that we will cover another time, it was invented by a guy named William Playfair in the late 1700’s.Ĭan you believe that? MODERN data visualization was created 3 centuries ago, the craziest part being that it has changed very little since. I would also venture to guess that not many people could tell me when modern data visualization was created. Almost everyone has had some kind of training in Microsoft Excel and has probably at the least created a hand-drawn chart on graphing paper in science class. I would venture to guess that everyone who has opened this has interacted with some form of data visualization before.
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