Visualization type rules
This section deserves a whole separate book and is interlinked with many other disciplines like storytelling, communication, and persuasion; as such, we won’t take the time here to delve into a lengthy list of visualization-type rules but, rather, highlight a few frequently discussed ones. We will consider keeping simple shapes versus complex ones and the effective use of pie charts.
Keep shapes simple
Too many shape details impede comprehension. This is because shape details draw the user’s focus away from the data. Consider the following exercise using two different shopping cart images.
Let’s look at the following exercise steps:
- Open the workbook associated with this chapter and navigate to the
Simple Shopping Cart
worksheet. Note that the visualization is a scatter plot that shows the top-10-selling subcategories in terms of total sales and profits. - Navigate to the
Shapes
directory located in theMy
Tableau...