Customer Reviews

Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

- after Tufte. Tufte writes about brilliant, eloquent graphic design. Few writes about competent, legible business presentation. Tufte writes about good art, Few writes about servicable craft. If you've ever seen data presented in Excel, Word, or (god forbid) PowerPoint, you know how much we need competent craft.

The book is gently paced. It's for people who need to present numbers, but may not be wholly comfortable with numbers. It takes the reader by the hand, and walks through a series of very basic steps in reasoning about how a chart communicates, or fails to.

The book is very much oriented towards the chart and graph types that Excel can produce. Like it or not, that makes sense. Excel is what most readers have most acess to, and is what causes some of the ugliest problems. This book addresses those problems.

Few illustrates his points with a number of examples, both good and bad ones. He presents problems to solve, and presents answers to many of them. It's a textbook, and a good one. Its main message is, "Less is better."

This is for anyone who presents information, and for anyone who creates presentation software. I recommend this one.

//wiredweird

I bought and read the books of Tufte and Cleveland (The elements of graphing data). Tufte is pushing things too far, there are certain expectation people have about what they want to see in a graph, but his analysis of the "lie factor" is great and it's a beautiful book. Clevelands book is becoming outdated; the use of colours is really helpful and other than two glued-in pages he does not mention it at all. The analysis is cristal clear and it's full of good and bad examples. Someone ought to rework it, it's invaluable to me.
The recommendation that Few makes in his book are worth buying it and you can read this book in a day, just skip the long explanations. Its indeed long and a somewhat simple, leaving the impression that the content is rather thin, but if anyone presenting data would stick to these simple rules, presentations would make a major step forward in clarity.
My conclusion:
- if you are a scientist, go for Cleveland.
- If have been a scientist and became a "manager" buy Few.
- If you are active in politics or other domains that communicate to the large public, Tufte will tell you how to tell the truth :-)
One more thing: pie charts are there to stay, no matter how hard we fight them and how many authors hate them and break them down with good arguments. One cannot turn back the clock, there is something like fashion in the way we present data.

As a consultant I need to gather and analyze data and transform it into information and findings. This book leads you through the transformation of data - especially if you use Excel or PowerPoint - by showing how to select the best table and chart formats to convey the information aggregated from data.

The thrust of the book is communicating. The author lays a solid foundation early in the book by covering qualtitative relationships, summarization and various data types. He then builds upon the foundation with succinct discussions and advice on selecting tablular formats and the correct charts to convey the information.

While Excel is the principal tool used to illustrate the concepts and techniques in the book, I have applied the author's advice to Visio and PowerPoint, as well as a few more obscure charting and graphics programs.

I like the clarity with which the information is presented, and the practical examples given throughout the book. More importantly, this book isn't a tome that is aimed at graphic designers, making it an ideal resource for technical and business professionals who do not fully grasp the nuances of graphic presentation.

If you present data and information - using any application - I strongly recommend this book because it will make your presentations meaningful and easy-to-understand, and will show you how to avoid a plethora of common mistakes like using the wrong chart or impossible to understand tables.

I work in finance and create many charts and graphs. I figured a book like this would help me to design them better. I was really looking for a practical guide rather than a long, rambling academic textbook, but that's how this book reads.

It seems aimed at college underclassmen rather than business professionals. Few spends page after page discussing the most basic mathematical concepts and things that you simply don't need to know in order to create a graph. For example, there is an entire chapter on basic statistics such as how to calculate a mean, median and mode. There is also a lengthy discussion of how the human eye works.

As I went through the book I found myself thinking: "Wow, Few has so little to say about tables and graphs that he needs all of this filler material to make this seem like a real book!"

There are some valuable chapters at the end of the book, but it takes a lot of patience to get there.

The page format is also really annoying and too textbook-like. It is a really wide book with citations (90% of which seemed to be from Tufte) in the wide margins.

I give this review one star for the 15 or so pages worth of good advice it contains. Unfortunately that wasn't enough content to warrant an entire textbook If you're a business professional looking for something you can use, this book is VASTLY overpriced and oversized.

My final comment is on the cover: An eye. A Brain. A sun. Bars coming out of each. It says very little to me, and that seemed to be the theme of the book. I wish I'd have seen a real review on this book before I shelled out $30.

After reading "Show Me the Numbers," while preparing to post a review of this exceptional book, I felt compelled to respond to the odd and uninformed comments posted by the reviewer who goes by the name Joey Canuck. His primary criticism seems to be that the book is bloated with more words than necessary to present the content. I couldn't disagree more. Perhaps Mr. Canuck disapproves of the author's approach to teaching, which involves a thorough, step-by-step construction of the concepts, complemented by many practical examples, which I believe to be a sound approach when you intend to help people learn. Just like well designed tables and graphs, the design of this book, without frivolous or distracting content, demonstrates a clear focus on communication.

Contrary to Joey Canuck's claim, this book has nothing to do with Excel, other than instructions that appear in an appendix for using Excel to create a particular graph. The principles and practices taught in this book are software agnostic. Regarding consistency with the principles taught by Edward Tufte, I found this book to be quite true to them, and a fitting application and extension of Tufte's principles to the data presentation needs faced every day in the business world. Canuck's complaint that the first grid line does not appear in a graph until page 207 suggests that he is not very familiar with Tufte's teachings, which would deem grid lines in most business graphs as "chartjunk." Actually, the first graph with grid lines appears on page 4, but as an example of the poor design that is common in business today.

A big part of my work involves the creation of reports, consisting largely of tables and graphs. I must often fight for the need to keep the presentation of data simple and clear. "Show Me the Numbers" provides me with the support I need to do this effectively and compellingly.

For someone like me, a programmer interested in creating better user interfaces, this is a really good book. I have no formal training in creating better visual displays, and this book has helped me understand decent graph layout. I've read the Tufte books, and while I really like them, they are often more qualitative than quantitative (no pun intended) in their descriptions. This book spells out how to make a good table based on the type of data, the number of fields being used, the relationship of the fields, etc. It's very hands on and very usable. My one complaint is I think he strays too far in to the cognitive aspect of how we see and understand data than he needs to given the focus of this book.

I highly recommend this book because it teaches the critical skill of designing tables and charts essential for every business professional. Our fact-based corporate culture requires us to effectively explain and motivate through the use of tables and charts. It is the `bread-and-butter' of business intelligence.

As a practical teach-me-the-skill book, Stephen Few has created 'Show Me The Numbers' by taking well-grounded principles (from Tufle and others) and by artfully applying them. The title echoes throughout the book as the recurring theme. The book unfolds design principles based on context and relationships. Through a series of practice exercises, the author has shown a sincere interest in teaching the reader this skill. Stephen nudges the reader to think about the proper design that clearly tells the story embedded in the numbers and to communicate that story accurately and honestly.

As a person who's created reports, dashboards and analytical products professionally for the last 20 years, I've found information design skills took years to acquire the hard way. I'm a big fan of the literature from people like Edward Tufte, but applying it to everyday work is too abstract for most people.

This book fixes all that, by providing practical, straightforward best practices to handle the situations that come up in the real world. It shows many examples of typical bad designs, why they are bad, and how to fix them, in a way that makes learning the techniques easy.

Besides that, it's a beautifully finished book that can serve as both a text and a reference

This book is the first real effort to address the poor quality of business graphics that have been so easily produced with the proliferation of personal computer software like Excel and Powerpoint. Few's insights are intelligent, well-thought out and practical enough to be understood and implemented by every businessperson.

I've always been a big fan of Edward Tufte, but never felt that his books provided enough practical guidance for analysts and knowledge workers. Show Me the Numbers fills that void and provides readers with a framework for not only designing superior business graphics, but more importantly, communicating effectively with an audience.

Business schools should make this book mandatory for all students.

As other reviewers have already noted, this is indeed an excellent book. Show Me the Numbers covers just about everything you need to know in order to present quantitative information in a clear and persuasive manner. Follow the author's advice and your graphs will tell a useful story, rather than merely list statistics; highlight significant trends, rather than obscure meaningful relationships.

I particularly liked the chapter on how visual perception influences a reader's ability to understand various types of graphic displays. The author clearly illustrates graphic techniques which work WITH our natural tendencies, and thus promote rapid comprehension of the underlying quantitative message. Learning about visual perception helped me more deeply understand and internalize the essence of good graphic design.

In summary, this is a tremendously practical book. The only bad thing about Show Me the Numbers, is that I now cringe nearly every time I see a graph - as I am painfully aware of how poorly designed most of them are. Do yourself a favor, buy a few extra copies of Show Me the Numbers and pass them around at work!