The Big Picture: How to Use Data Visualization to Make Better Decisions Faster
I’ve already read many data visualization books, including The Big Book of Dashboards. And I was expecting high quality book from Steve Wexler. But this book is even better than I expected. Steve says it’s a book for business professionals who don’t create dashboards, but want to decipher and understand the dashboards. It’s true. But if you’re a creator of the dashboards, then you need to understand how dashboards consumer will be seeing and understanding your dashboards. You need to know your audience and to understand how they benefit from what you created for them. You need to be able to create dashboards that work for your audience. And this book will help both parties to understand each other and to understand how they can collaborate to see the big picture.
If you’re a top manager and part of your job is to watch dashboards so you can make better decisions, then buy this book to everyone who makes decisions in your organization and to everyone who helps them to make the decisions (by creating chats, reports, dashboards, presentations). If you’re data visualization developer then buy this book for yourself and recommend it to your colleagues and to your boss. If you’re an independent professional then recommend it to your clients.
The book is amazing from the beginning trough all chapters, but Chapter 9 is like an extended version of The Big Book of Dashboards. Real world examples of the dashboards that helped the audience to see the big picture. The previous chapters answers questions what chart types to use, how to choose colors, how to get people to use your charts, and why collaboration and knowing your audience is so important.
Read The Big Picture, help others to see the big picture and see the big picture.