Practical Charts is written for anyone who regularly creates graphs and tables for “everyday” reports and presentations. Target readers include business intelligence professionals, data analysts, data scientists, statisticians, and software developers, as well as educators, financial and policy analysts, marketers, human resource professionals, researchers, sales professionals, journalists and any other role that requires communicating data to others.

The book is suitable for those with little data visualization experience, but those with decades of data wrangling experience will also benefit since many have never learned how to design effective charts. Readers don’t need to have any prior data visualization knowledge, however, they should have at least some experience creating basic charts in a data visualization software product, such as Microsoft Excel, Tableau Desktop, Google Sheets, Qlik Sense, JMP, or a similar tool.

While many excellent books on data visualization have been written during the past 100+ years, Practical Charts…

• Provides guidance that’s more specific, not relying on intuition or experience that chart creators might not have acquired yet.

• Is more complete, covering many common design challenges (e.g., how to handle outliers, how to handle missing values, when to include or not include zero in a chart’s scale, etc.) and common mistakes that come up all the time in practice, and that tend not to be covered in other books.

• Is friendlier, written in simple, jargon-free language that’s easy to read for data visualization novices and those for whom English is a second language. There are even some jokes. Or things that I consider to be jokes, anyway. Whatev.

Practical Charts is organized into seven parts:

Part 1: General chart formatting guidelines

Part 1 covers formatting guidelines that apply to all chart types, as well has how to avoid common chart formatting mistakes:

• Formatting gridlines, tick marks, axis lines, borders, and other “non-data” elements

• Formatting scales (categorical, quantitative, time)

• Choosing colors

• Formatting legends/keys

• Formatting text, numbers, and dates

Part 2: Choosing a chart type

Part 2 is the longest part of the book, containing detailed information on 30 important chart types that are commonly needed when making everyday charts and when to use each, organized into seven groups:

• Line charts and other ways to show data over time

• Pie charts and other ways to show the breakdown of a total

• Maps

• Bar charts

• Tables

• Combo charts

• Chart types to use cautiously or avoid

Part 3: Showing data with a more complex structure (“small multiples”)

Part 3 discusses how to handle common, challenging situations when the data to be visualized has a more complex structure.

Part 4: Interactive filters and chart animations

Part 4 discusses the unobvious but significant challenges that interactive filters and animation can create for audiences and provides suggestions for how to avoid using these features.

Part 5: Making charts obvious

Part 5 covers techniques for making key messages and takeaways obvious, such as visually highlighting the most important part(s) of a chart, explicitly stating insights and recommendations in chart callouts and titles, and adding comparison/reference values.

Part 6: Making charts less boring

Part 6 summarizes techniques from other chapters that make charts interesting and engaging, and includes a list of other ways that chart creators often try to “spice up” charts but that end up making charts harder to read, less obvious, or more prone to misinterpretation.

Part 7: What now?

Part 7 provides suggestions on how to continue learning and improving, as well as my take on some emerging technologies that might (or might not) change data visualization in the future.

How to use specific software products (Excel, Tableau, Qlik, etc.)

The guidelines in Practical Charts apply to all “everyday” charts, regardless of the software product that’s used to create the chart. It assumes that you have a basic (not expert) working knowledge of at least one data visualization software product and access to an Internet search engine to look up anything that you’re not sure how to do in that software product. None of the chart types or techniques in the book require specialized software product features or expertise.

How to create artistic charts, data art, infographics, etc.

Everyday charts for reports and presentations generally don’t need to be artistic (although they shouldn’t be ugly; more on that in the book).

How to create specialized charts

Practical Charts only covers simple, everyday charts for reports and presentations. There’s no discussion of specialized charts for fields like mineral exploration, advanced financial analysis, genomics, etc. However, most of what this book teaches will apply to those more specialized charts, as well.

How to design information dashboards

Information dashboards entail a whole other set of challenges that don’t arise when creating individual charts. For information on creating effective dashboards, check out the Practical Dashboards course.

Advanced “data storytelling” techniques

This book focuses on what Nick calls the “spelling and vocabulary” of dataviz, which includes fundamental skills such as choosing a chart type, deciding how wide or narrow to make quantitative scales, and many others. It’s necessary to learn these fundamental skills before learning how to create effective “data stories,” since making a poor chart type choice or making a scale too wide or narrow will (and frequently does) torpedo even the most effective data stories.

The book covers some basic “storytelling” techniques, such as adding key takeaways in callouts in charts, but not advanced storytelling techniques, such as using suspense, characters, or story arcs.

Using charts for data analysis rather than communicating data to an audience

While charts are obviously an effective way of communicating data-related insights to others, they’re also a powerful way to explore and analyze data on your own. Using charts to explore and analyze data on your own is fundamentally different from using charts to communicate insights to an audience, however. This book only covers creating charts for communicating data to others.

Therefore, the book only covers chart types that most audiences are familiar with, such as bar charts, stacked bar charts, clustered bar charts, line charts, pie charts, etc., along with a few less common chart types that are required to communicate data accurately in specific but common situations, such as step charts, dot plots and merged bar charts. If your audience is relatively sophisticated and can grasp “advanced” chart types such as scatter plots, histograms and cycle plots, my book, More Practical Charts: 20 additional chart types for data-savvy audiences covers those chart types and is scheduled to be published in 2024.

This book also doesn’t cover how to decide which insights you should communicate to an audience, which questions you should answer for them, etc. Those skills go far beyond data visualization and fall under general business skills, performance management, strategic planning, and other areas. This book “begins” when you have some data and something to say about that data, and covers how to do that effectively.

The Practical Charts and More Practical Charts books are based on Nick Desbarats’ Practical Charts course. The Practical Charts course is available as a pre-recorded, on-demand course, and Nick regularly delivers live, private workshops for 15 to 60 employees of the same organization, and live open-registration workshops approximately three times a year. For more information on taking the Practical Charts course, please click the links above or contact us.

Interested in purchasing 10 or more copies of Practical Charts for your team or organization? We offer discounts on bulk purchases.

For information on booking Nick to deliver a private Practical Charts online or in-person workshop for your team, please contact us.

“Practical Charts is essential material for any class on data, charts, and graphs.”
- Simon Queenborough, Senior Researcher and Lecturer, Yale University

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Missing pages? Poor color quality? Other weird problems? Unfortunately, you may have a counterfeit (fake) copy of Practical Charts (argh). How to verify if your copy is genuine.