Chapter 2
Handling Data
Before you start working on the visual part of any visualization, you actually need data. The data is what makes a visualization interesting. If you don’t have interesting data, you just end up with a forgettable graph or a pretty but useless picture. Where can you find good data? How can you access it?
When you have your data, it needs to be formatted so that you can load it into your software. Maybe you got the data as a comma-delimited text file or an Excel spreadsheet, and you need to convert it to something such as XML, or vice versa. Maybe the data you want is accessible point-by-point from a web application, but you want an entire spreadsheet.
Learn to access and process data, and your visualization skills will follow.
