The practice of creating visualizations is rapidly growing just as machine learning, digital
facial recognition, unstructured data analytics, and data science are growing. There are
many smart and user-friendly tools available for creating visualizations. Selecting the
appropriate tool will depend on many factors, including the knowledge, skills, and
abilities of the visualization producer. Some features to consider when selecting a tool
include the following:

• Ease of use


• Drag and drop capability


• Ability to connect to multiple data sources


• Ability to manage the data


• Open and standard APIs


• User-friendly development environment


• Ability to share and collaborate


• Interactive capability


• Features that are up to date


• Scalable


• Manageable security


• Nice-looking visual results to fit the purpose

Here are some of the leading tools on the market today for creating visualizations without
requiring detailed programming skills:

• Qlik


• Tableau


• Microsoft Power BI


• Sisense

Summary

There is great value in the process of creating and telling a story through visualizations.
The visualization framework is the best methodology to use to ensure visualizations are
created with the right content and can be understood in the right context. The process of
defining the purpose and talking with the audience, collecting the data, designing the
visualization in a story format, and distributing the visualization allows data to be more
easily understood for the audience to focus on what is important. Using visualizations to
tell a story through data is a great way to provide better information, knowledge, and
insights. Telling a story through visualizations will continue to be necessary moving
forward to enable data to be better understood for more accurate outcomes and
decisions.

Chapter 18.1: An Introduction to Data Visualizations