a visualization can be shared or distributed. It's important to consider this step before you
design your visualization as the purpose will define how it should be distributed. Is the
purpose for the visualization to inform or to allow data discovery? Will your audience
view only or interact with the visualization to discover insights?

Purpose: To Inform or Educate

To inform or educate the audience, the story should unfold by showing the data and
visualizations in an order that tells the story. For example, if data are collected to
understand customer sentiment about their hotel stay, a visualization can be created to
show the customer sentiment over time and put into a story format. Consider using data
from the past, present, and predicted future to tell stories for the best outcome or
decisions.

Visualizations can be shared or distributed to inform or educate the audience in different
ways that may include the following.

PowerPoint: Visualization charts may be copied and pasted to a PowerPoint slide with additional

details added to tell the highlight what is being told.

Dashboard: A dashboard is a collection of visualizations aligned to the business goals to be used as a

management report. A dashboard can provide an at-a-glance view of key performance indicators (KPIs)

and measures to drive action for improvements.

Infographic: An infographic is similar to a visualization as it is a visual representation of the data.

However, an infographic may contain more images, pictures, and words that are conceptual in addition

to data in a visual form. Infographics are usually very focused and used to captivate an audience. They

can be a single page or multiple pages in length. Infographics can be a great tool to use for marketing

campaigns or to summarize a study to include visualizations.

Purpose: To Interact or Explore

If the purpose for the visualization is to explore the data, then an interactive visualization
can be valuable. To distribute an interactive visualization will depend on the software
used. Most visualization tools have the capability to publish the visualization to the
Internet (cloud) so the user can interact and explore the data. With defined user
permissions, the user can change different variables, while all charts in the story update.
Interactive visualizations are great for the user to do “what if” questions and to see the
outcome visually.

Data Visualization Tools and Software

Chapter 18.1: An Introduction to Data Visualizations