It's Not Just Window Dressing

A few weeks ago, I talked about how pictures can't make everything simpler and how words are still really important for communicating ideas. This week, I've been struggling with the opposite problem: taking data and turning it into graphs that make a stronger statement than words ever could. A graph is more than just a way to make something look "pretty" by giving it a visual element. Graphs make it quicker and easier to see and interpret data.

If you had the choice, which of the following documents would you pick up first?

They both have exactly the same text, but the one on the right looks more interesting. More importantly, your eye is drawn to the graph in the one on the right, which contains the main message of the document. In the one on the left, the data are buried halfway down the page in a bulleted list, and you can't easily see which value is higher or compare values to each other. But in the one on the right, the bars in the graph tell you which value is bigger or smaller, even without looking at the numbers. You can see it in seconds in the one on the right, but you have to wade through text in the one on the left.

Pictures may not always be good at simplifying processes, but they are great at simplifying data. So the next time you're struggling to put your data into words, put your data into a graph. It's not just window dressing to make the document look better. It's a powerful tool for communicating.