Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten Author: Stephen Few | Language: English | ISBN:
0970601972 | Format: PDF
Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten Description
Most presentations of quantitative information are poorly designed—painfully so, often to the point of misinformation. This problem, however, is rarely noticed and even more rarely addressed. We use tables and graphs to communicate quantitative information: the critical numbers that measure the health, identify the opportunities, and forecast the future of our organizations. Even the best information is useless, however, if its story is poorly told. This problem exists because almost no one has ever been trained to design tables and graphs for effective and efficient communication. Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten is the most accessible, practical, and comprehensive guide to table and graph design available.
The second edition of Show Me the Numbers improves on the first by polishing the content throughout (including updated figures) and adding 91 more pages of content, including: 1) A new preface; 2) A new chapter entitled "Silly Graphs That Are Best Forsaken," which alerts readers to some of the current misuses of graphs such as donut charts, circle charts, unit charts, and funnel charts; 3) A new chapter about quantitative narrative entitled "Telling Compelling Stories with Numbers"; and 4) New appendices entitled "Constructing Table Lens Displays in Excel," "Constructing Box Plots in Excel," and "Useful Color Palettes."
- Hardcover: 371 pages
- Publisher: Analytics Press; Second edition (June 1, 2012)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0970601972
- ISBN-13: 978-0970601971
- Product Dimensions: 11.2 x 8.7 x 1.3 inches
- Shipping Weight: 3.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Stephen Few has a rare talent for explaining apparently opaque concepts in simple terms, but without simplifying the subject. This book starts from the *very* beginning and provides the reader with a solid understanding of the basics of chart design, including when to use a table vs a graph, what types of tables and graphs to use for what kinds of data, and why certain graphical features are more effective than others. Throughout, Few maintains a plain, readable writing style that is never patronizing even when spelling out seemingly obvious points (e.g., use a table if you need to look up a specific value). His patient tone and simple presentation end up guiding you through some unexpectedly sophisticated waters of design almost without your even realizing you've gone anywhere.
In addition to the design coverage, Few covers some (very) basic statisics, how to adjust for inflation, rgb values of a nice selection of colors to use in graphs, how to make box graphs in Excel, and many other workaday details that make the book immediately useful. Most of the charts in the book are made in Excel, showing that you don't need advanced design software to make attractive, clear charts.
The book itself is a beautiful large hardback. This is the source of my one complaint: its large size makes it somewhat difficult to just pop off the shelf and flip through to find something.
If you want to learn how to design good tables and graphs, get it.
By Galen Menzel
Okay, I'll admit that I haven't read "Show Me The Numbers" from cover to cover, even though I've owned a copy (a signed copy!) for a few years. But it's not the kind of book that requires this to get the value from it.
My field is organisational performance measurement, and I've seen countless examples of performance reports that truly suck. They are ugly, they are cumbersome, the data is misrepresented and awkwardly displayed. It's near impossible to draw conclusions, and even more impossible to draw valid conclusions about what performance is doing, and why. How can you make wise business decisions with information fodder so poor?
So Stephen's book is a gold mine of sensible statistical basics to help us all - novices and experienced practitioners alike - to improve the way we design and use tables and graphs to highlight relationships and patterns in data like comparisons, trends and correlations.
One of my favourite parts of the book is in chapter 7, "General Design for Communication", where Stephen lays out a wonderful framework for how text can be used to assist tables and graphs to tell the story of the data. This framework is a wonderful checklist for how to design the content of a performance report that can highlight, interpret, explain and recommend responses to signals in our performance measures.
By Stacey Barr
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