The old adage about a picture being worth a thousand words is true. When it comes to communicating information, a picture–or information graphic in this case-is worth many words AND plenty of time. At their core, information graphics provide the ability to make comparisons quickly and easily. Humans are simply wired to see first and THEN read. A simple pie chart can communicate almost instantly the composition of a whole. Tools like Excel allow us great power over tremendous amounts of data, but as Peter Parker’s uncle Ben warned him “With great power comes great responsibility.”

Recently I was having a conversation with a friend. He was relating  a story about a presentation within his workplace. Unfortunately it was an all-to-common tale of a PowerPoint presentation gone bad. I’m sure you’ve probably witnessed these—bar or pie charts that seem to have been extruded from jello, confusing scales, and, to borrow a term from Edward Tufte: “chartjunk.” What’s even more alarming is that you may have been subjected to poor information design without even knowing it!

When you begin planning your presentation you should consider a few things before having Excel churn out charts and graphs galore.

Take control of your charts and graphs.

First, consider if you even need a graphic for your information. Are you leaning on a graph to “pretty things up”? Don’t do it. Put down the mouse and step away from the computer.

What is it you are trying to convey? Going back to the whole “worth a thousand words” thing, your graph should have a message. No, not “Message” (with a capital “M”) as in some sort of profound statement, but a collection of data that taken together clearly and concisely illustrates a point.

Consider how you organize the data within your graph or chart. For example, if you’re going to have a simple chart showing the breakdown of number of conference attendees and the states they’re from, you might want to think about organizing the information in a logical way. Proper organization also serves to reinforce the point of the chart or graph.

Left: sorted by number of attendees; right: sorted, somewhat illogically, by state.

By listing the attendees according to numerical order, viewers can quickly see which state had the most (or least) attendees. If we were to organize the data according to state, viewers would have to skip around to see which state had how many attendees and making relative comparison would be next to impossible without re-drawing the chart.

Reinforce the information. Build in a little redundancy.

Consider ways to reinforce the important point, or message, of the graph. In this example we’re showing the increases in widget shipments over time. The difference in size between bars isn’t terribly dramatic and viewing the increase from the starting year to the goal isn’t readily apparent. Sure, we can see that there is a steady increase but that’s it. By adding a horizontal line in the right example, we immediately see the difference between the starting year and the goal. The dashed line serves as a baseline and lets us easily compare year to year change.

Left: we can see the increase, but how much from 2011 to 2030? Right: adding a reference line let's us see the relative increase immediately.

Color is also important. For instance, use red and green to reinforce negative and positive respectively. When possible, use the same color across graphs to represent the same thing. Don’t use purple to represent data A and in the very next chart use purple to represent data B.

3D effects in your charts and graphs can kill…your data.

Use “special effects” sparingly, if at all. In fact, we recommend against using 3D effects for charts and graphs as they only ever seem to muck things up and actually negate the benefits of presenting data in a graphical format.

Take a look and see which one you think is easier to read?

Left: Extruded and rotated may look cool, but what information does it impart? Plus, it makes it difficult to accurately read the data. Right: boring old 2D graph. A quick and easy read.

3D extrusions also have the effect of amplifying apparent area. This can be problematic in pie charts. Are the sides part of the visualization? Are we just looking at the face? What about the parts we can’t see? These may seem like silly questions, but they wouldn’t even come up if we stick with the simpler, and highly effective 2D graph.

Avoid confusion: Beware mismatched scales.

Finally, it’s a good idea to keep your graphs and charts separated if their scales aren’t identical. In the example below the two vertical axes are quite different in the numbers they represent. At first glance, it appears that the graphs are showing the same data, but they aren’t. Either the two scales should be adjusted to be identical, to avoid confusion, or the two graphs should be physically separated.

The vertical axes of the two graphs are completly out of scale. Presented together like this results in confusion.

If the point was to compare the numbers of users to widgets shipped, then a single combined graph would be in order. This has the added benefit of allowing a quick assessment of the relationship between the number of widgets shipped in a given year and the number of users.

Combining widgets shipped and number of users in the same graph enhances the information imparted and makes it easier to compare the two sets of data.

Good charts and graphs take a thoughtful human touch. Let Excel stick to crunching numbers.

Creating good information graphics is not a practice best left up to the cold calculations of programs like Excel. There’s definitely more than a tiny bit of art to the creation of good, useful charts and graphs that requires a human touch. By following these tips you’ll be well on your way to creating information graphics that help support and communicate your information. And everybody will be able to get out of the meeting with their sanity intact.