“You must unlearn what you have learned”, said Master Yoda. Tables are not visuals! Truth? Have you ever heard that?
Nothing more wrong. Tables are a very powerful tool for visualizing data if you use them wisely. The main advantage of tables is the ability to present several measures for the same category in one row. This allows your audience to make quicker decisions because all important information is “on the table”.
However, the human brain READ the table. There are plenty back and forward iterations which it does to understand table content. So to make understanding easier, some additional elements should be introduced into tables. In the end, we don’t want to overload the lazy brains of our audience. Let’s see how we can improve tables to make them more accessible for people.
What makes the bottom table better than this at the top? There are several bullet points, which I’m going to address. You should have already noticed titles. Titles, itself, are introducing a huge difference.
Flat table
This table is simply flat. All information is at the same level, which means that they equally attract your attention. Nothing is highlighted, except for the second rows… which is unnecessary. Well, it’s hard to read, right? There are more sins: small fonts, cluttering elements such as lines, grey backgrounds, no formats of values.
Meaningful table
In the table, I’ve introduced information hierarchy by using different font colour. Rows and columns headers are in the background. Values have the darker, bold font. What is more, visual elements are added. Bars differentiate revenue volume, RAG icons simply convey the message about target realization, arrows indicate the direction of the year over year change. Columns headers well describe a column content and columns order leads through information importance.
Convince Me with Data 