Practical Charts

It's surprisingly tricky to design simple, "everyday" charts for reports and presentations. Even experienced data pros and major news media outlets often create charts that leave audiences bored, unconvinced, confused, or—worst of all—that accidentally misrepresent the underlying data. Why does this happen? Well, design decisions like choosing a chart type, choosing colors, and deciding what range a scale should span require a surprising amount of expertise to get right.

Practical Charts provides easy-to-follow, concrete guidelines that quickly enable chart makers of any experience level to design expert-level charts that are clear and compelling. Readers will learn how to tackle over 90% of the chart design challenges that arise in real-world situations and how to avoid over 90% of the common mistakes that chart creators make.
Written in an entertaining, jargon-free style by globally recognized data visualization expert Nick Desbarats, Practical Charts condenses the courses that he's delivered for NASA, The United Nations, Blomberg, Visa, Yale University, and many others into an easy-to-read book that includes...

• When to use 30 essential chart types
• 17 chart design cheat sheets
• Over 180 key takeaways

As an independent educator and consultant, Nick Desbarats has taught data visualization and information dashboard design to thousands of professionals in over a dozen countries at organizations such as NASA, Bloomberg, Visa, The United Nations, Yale University, Marathon Oil, Shopify, The Internal Revenue Service, The Central Bank of Tanzania, and many others.

He regularly delivers keynote or main-stage talks at major data conferences such as Tableau Conference, TDWI World Conference, SAS Explorers, Data Innovation Summit, and others, and his articles in The Journal of the Data Visualization Society (Nightingale) are among the publication's most widely read.
 
Nick was the first and only educator to be authorized by Stephen Few to deliver his foundational data visualization and dashboard design courses, which he taught from 2014 until launching his own courses in 2019. Prior to that, Nick held senior executive positions at several software companies and was a cofounder of BitFlash Inc., which raised over 20M in venture financing and was sold to OpenText Corporation. In 2012, Nick was granted a United States patent in the decision-support field.