Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals

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.