Guides

Let's work through a practical example to see how asking and answering questions helps guide you towards more focused data graphics.

Things have a way of repeating themselves, and it can be useful to highlight these patterns in data.

It's important to consider the reasons so that we don't overreact. Otherwise, we're just berating, pointing, and laughing all of the time, and that's not good for anyone.

Focus on finding or displaying contrasting points, and some visual methods are more helpful than others. A guide.

Step 1: Figure out why the outlier exists in the first place. Step 2: Choose from these visualization options to show the outlier.

We love complete and nicely formatted data. That's not what we get a lot of the time.

Data is an abstraction, and it's impossible to encapsulate everything it represents in real life. So there is uncertainty. Here are ways to visualize the uncertainty.

These are the quick and simple tools I use to pick colors to represent data.

I’ve been teaching my three-year-old son how to ride his bike on two…

Apples and oranges situations where the comparisons make no sense.

Mean, median, and mode. These are the first things you learn about in…

The histogram is one of my favorite basic chart types, because it lets…

Many charts don't tell the truth. This is a simple guide to spotting them.

"Let the data speak" they say. But what happens when the data rambles on and on?

This is an update to the guide I wrote in 2009, which as it turns out, is now mostly outdated. So, 2016. Here we go.