Clear Off the Table

We obtained various consideration for our Data Looks Better Naked put up. People purchased bored on Christmas Eve and some attention-grabbing searches for Star Trek someway landed them on our net web page. Now their charts look larger. The concepts outlined in that article aren’t just for charts, though. You can apply them to your data tables with comparable enhancements in readability and aesthetics. To paraphrase Edward Tufte, too usually after we create a data desk, we imprison our data behind a wall of grid strains. Instead we’ll let the data itself sort the building that aids readability by making larger use of alignment and whitespace.

In the gif below we start with a desk formatted very similar to actually considered one of Excel’s many styling selections which, very like the chart sorts, do nothing to reinforce the desk. Progressive deletions and some reorganization ship a clearer and additional compelling picture.

As with charts, fairly than dressing up our data we must be stripping it down. For additional data on desk design, you could be taught Chapter 8 of Stephen Few’s Show Me the Numbers. My apologies to any true followers of 80’s wrestling, the stats below, very like the ring rivalries, are solely fabricated.

The slide deck for viewing at your private tempo: