How to Choose the Right Chart for your Data

You have so much data. However, your data cannot communicate anything unless they are being organized in a way that would help you and others to understand and interpret effectively. Well, organized data can even reveal a lot of information and lead you to make decisions that will have a better effect on your business. Sometimes, from the data, you can adopt strategies that will generate more sales, more awareness, more preference ability, more coverage and thus, it is very critical to organize the data and use the right visualization. 

What happens when your data is misrepresented?

When the data you have are miss-presented, and they show ineffective presentation then, there are important and essential insights that will be lost. Moreover, it will hurt your message and your reputation. 

Data Organization

Organizing your data doesn’t require that you have a master degree or a PHD. It is a very easy process with the help of charts and visualization, the right explanation and interpretation of the data will happen. 

• Find your Story 

In order to start creating your data and organizing it, you need to find a story and it is that you visualize how you want to set your data. There are many ways that can represent your data. However, you can identify and understand the story. Moreover, set your data in a way that will help you build relationships between the exposed data. And that would be selecting the proper visualization along with the best way to deliver the message. Finding your story would be as assorting the data in ascending order as the types of the actions carried and their revenues. It could be as the story with having numbers as the numbers of the units sold or the number of employees in the office or the number of customers you have contracts with. Moreover, to find your story, then you need to know your data. 

• Find your Story 

In order to start creating your data and organizing it, you need to find a story and it is that you visualize how you want to set your data. There are many ways that can represent your data. However, you can identify and understand the story. Moreover, set your data in a way that will help you build relationships between the exposed data. And that would be selecting the proper visualization along with the best way to deliver the message. Finding your story would be as assorting the data in ascending order as the types of the actions carried and their revenues. It could be as the story with having numbers as the numbers of the units sold or the number of employees in the office or the number of customers you have contracts with. Moreover, to find your story, then you need to know your data. 

Read also: Mind Map Creation

Data relationships 

There are several relationships that you can have along with your data as follow:

• TIME-SERIES 

This way will be showing the changes that have occurred to your product over time. It could be in the value of the sales and revenues over a certain period. It can include monthly sales, annual sales or quarterly sales. 

• DEVIATION 

This method is showing how data points can be related to one another. It will be setting a mean or a number or target and you compare this data to it. Moreover, whenever there are declines when comparing the two data to one another, then, you will be able to detect it. For example; sales in the Covid-19 period to the period before, or comparing the degree of temperature on this week to the week before. 

• CORRELATION

This method is when there would be two or more data and they would all lead to the same conclusion as there are negative correlations as for example, the lowering of salaries, lowering of sales and lowering in attendance rate. 

• NOMINAL COMPARISON 

This way would be showing comparisons of the quantitative values of the subcategories as for example the number of the viewers to the different websites. 

• DISTRIBUTION 

This method would be showing how the data can be distributed around a central value as for example the number of passengers on the flight and their seating in the different cabins. 

• PART-TO-WHOLE RELATIONSHIPS

This method would be showing how the subset of the data that would be used to be compared to the larger whole as the percentage of the customers purchasing coffee products.

How to Choose the Right Chart for your Data

If you want to define the perfect chart for your data, you have to get to know the different chart types as the following.

Chart Types 

After selecting the relationship of your data and identifying the sources of data that you want and how you want to show them, then you can apply them to charts. Charts have many types as the Bar Chart, the Pie Chart, the Area Chart, the Line Chart, the Scatter Plot Bubble Chart and the Heat Map. 

• Bar Chart 

        Bar charts are showing that they can be very versatile. They are best when you have a relationship of your data to show changes over time and they would be used to be comparing the different categories or they would be comparing the parts to the whole. They could be vertical or horizontal. 

• Pie Chart

        Pie charts would be the best used for making part-to-whole relationship comparisons with having discrete or even continuous data. They are considered as the most impactful especially with a small data set. They can be standard or donut-like.

• Line Chart 

        Line charts would be usually used to show time-series relationships with continuous data. They are the ones that would help in showing trend, or acceleration, or deceleration, and to show volatility. 

• Area Charts 

        Area charts would be over a time-series relationship, but they are different from line charts as they have the ability to represent volume.

• Scatter Plots 

       Scatter plots would be used to show the relationship between items that are based on two sets of variables. They serve as the best tool to show correlation in a large amount of data.

• Bubble Chart 

      Bubble charts are very good in showing high-quality for displaying nominal comparisons or in the representation of the ranking relationships.

• Heat Map 

       Heat maps would be used to display categorical data, and it is using intensity of color in order to represent values of geographic areas or data tables.

Read also: Ai Art Generator

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