What is Data Visualization

Data visualization is not only about showing the graphs or bar charts in excel, although it is one of the parts, but is much more than that. Data visualization is graphical presentation of information. Its advantage is to enable decision makers to see analytics presented visually and to provide decision makers insights into complex data set, so they can grasp difficult concepts or identify new patterns. With data visualization, people can take the concept a step further by using technology to drill down into charts and graphs for more detail, interactively changing what data you see and how it’s processed.

Not long ago, data visualization was not a necessary skill to have for managers. But nowadays, many things have gone digital, so many decisions making relies on data, data visualization becomes a must-have skills set. In this Big Data generation, data comes in overwhelming velocity and extremely huge volume that we cannot comprehend it without filtering. Data becomes the primary force behind this changing. The ability to create smart visualization become a need for managers, because it is the way to make the work they do meaningful. There are a lot of different tools out there for data visualization, such as SAS Data Miner and Tableau, which help people way easier to visualize the complex data. People can pick the tool they feel comfortable and match with the needs of company to use. However, there are some techniques in common for people who want to visualize data set and we will talk about it in the next article.