Practical Charts: The Essential Guide to Creating Clear, Compelling Charts for Reports and Presentations

It’s surprisingly tricky to design simple, “everyday” charts for reports and presentations. Even experienced data pros and major news media outlets often create charts that leave audiences bored, unconvinced, confused, or—worst of all—that accidentally misrepresent the underlying data. Why does this happen? Well, design decisions like choosing a chart type, choosing colors, and deciding what range a scale should span require a surprising amount of expertise to get right.

Practical Charts provides easy-to-follow, concrete guidelines that quickly enable chart makers of any experience level to design expert-level charts that are clear and compelling. Readers will learn how to tackle over 90% of the chart design challenges that arise in real-world situations and how to avoid over 90% of the common mistakes that chart creators make.
Written in an entertaining, jargon-free style by globally recognized data visualization expert Nick Desbarats, Practical Charts condenses the courses that he’s delivered for NASA, The United Nations, Blomberg, Visa, Yale University, and many others into an easy-to-read book that includes…

• When to use 30 essential chart types
• 17 chart design cheat sheets
• Over 180 key takeaways