As our world becomes increasingly data-saturated, more people must interpret and share key insights from data. We can all become more skilled at presenting and consuming data by being aware of how we best perceive data of different types.
To improve everyone's data awareness we will be presenting occasional brief articles talking about things we can do to make data easier to understand, both for ourselves and those we share it with.
The first key aspect of data presentation it is important to know is that humans have trouble perceiving trends in tables. For example, the table below displays average temperatures broken down by week. Looking at the below table it can be hard to see the relationship between week and temperature:
However, when we graph the variables, the relationship becomes obvious.
Visualizing data can make it easy to detect patterns that we might otherwise miss. If you want to try this for yourself, you can graph some sample datasets for free at Vizdium. Want to get even more in depth with data exploration with your own data? Try Google Sheets.
In a future article, we'll talk about a related issue: different types of graphs you can use to look for trends and their strengths and weaknesses.
