March dataviz madness: table vs graph
March madness is here—this three-week period when college basketball fever sweeps the States on the path to crowning the NCAA national champion. We’re pulled into the drama and tension of a single elimination tournament (who will emerge as the Cinderella team to upset a No. 1 seed?) and the stakes are high for teams: one sub-par performance and you’re out.
When it comes to communicating with data, the stakes can also be high. Maybe not quite as ruthless as a single elimination tournament (one ineffective graph usually doesn’t mean our season is over) but a subpar visual might mean a missed opportunity for our audience to make a data-driven decision.
In data visualization, well-designed visuals are buzzer beating 3-pointers: they capture our attention because they get the main point across quickly and effectively. In today’s post, we’ll look at a dataviz match-up: will it be the table or the graph for communicating an underlying message?
Imagine you’ve encountered the following table: either in a live setting (someone has shown this on a PowerPoint slide) or own your own (said PowerPoint slide has been emailed to you).
What’s your initial reaction to this much data? If you’re like me, you’d probably groan and move on, totally disregarding all the hard work that was done behind the scenes to produce this table. Ouch.
When deciding whether to use a table or a graph, consider what the audience needs to do with the data: Do they need a certain level of detail? Are there different units of measure that need to be relayed together? Will they need to refer to a specific line of interest or compare things one by one? If yes, then a table may meet those needs. However, if there’s an overarching message or story in the data, think about making it visual for your audience.
Back to our match-up—imagine that the underlying story is that in recent years, packaging costs have increased at a higher rate and are projected to exceed budget at the end of the fiscal year. Refer back to the tabular data—how long does it take you to find the data that supports this?
Contrast that time-consuming process with the visual below, where I’ve visualized the relevant pieces and added explanatory text and focus through sparing color to make the data more accessible:
So what is the appropriate use case for a table? When your audience needs detail on specific values or when you have multiple units of measure to report simultaneously. In my previous roles, we used tables frequently in monthly status meetings when the main goal was for participants to give updates on their lines of business and participants wanted to be able to go row by row (or column by column) and refer to specific lines of data. Over time we realized many of these tables weren’t being used and we’d push them to the appendix—they remained there for reference but weren’t competing for attention with the main takeaways.
While we won’t know who wins it all in March Madness until the national championship on April 8, in this match-up we can choose a clear winner: the graph!
In fact, the graph will typically win when there’s an overarching message in the data. A well-designed graph simply gets that information across more quickly than a well-designed table. Don’t make your audience do more work than necessary to understand the data!
For more examples of how to consider if a table is more effective than a graph, check out our previous posts: