Every day, tons of information and some of them are more and more valuable than others. In pursuit of delivering easy to understand and brief data presentation, people have been relying on visual displays to easily translate their data into useful information that their audience can easily comprehend. This is why charts are important in every industry. They are widely used not only as a means to interpret information accurately but also as a way to store a full data package in a brief layout.
A basic chart refers to the graphical representation of data in the form of symbols, such as lines, slices, or bars. The information may also be presented in a tabular form for a better analysis. Doing this allows you to translate numerous complex data to an audience with a better comprehension rate than confining them in a lengthy document with several paragraphs.
Charts are a well-known tool in research and data-gathering activities. This immediately denotes programs done in the academic sphere, but charts are also a helpful tool in business. In any entrepreneurial report or presentation, graphs often take the spotlight, and the data it translates provides the most reliable information.
A chart’s inherent function is already useful, but when it’s wrongfully structured, it will fail to deliver the best results. Check out some of the best practices when making charts:
Having a descriptive chart title is a vital factor in helping your audience interpret your data. Often, even with the right labels and an impressive information presentation, it would still fail to make sense without the right title guiding the viewers. And it’s not enough to have a title. The key is to be “descriptive.” If you want to show the increase of students in an educational institution through a printable bar chart, write down, “The Increase of Students in the Institution from 2016 to 2020” instead of merely putting “Institution Students.”
Considering how most organizational charts are a combination of text and graphic elements in a single layout, it can get messy. It might be difficult for viewers to find the exact information they’re looking for. This is why the right labeling is an essential part of any chart structure. And it doesn’t have to be all words and numbers; colors are widely popular in charts as well. As an example, to have a better pie graph outcome, legends are used so the viewer can easily identify the portions even when it’s outside the graph. To show emphasis, you can also use highlights and bold fonts.
Because a project chart is a visual structure, proper organization is a vital factor in helping people understand its data. Follow the right ascending and descending order to guide your audience’s eyes to the decrease and increase of certain figures. Follow the right reading pattern by aligning everything from left to right, especially when it comes to line graphs and bar graphs. Avoid tilting the labels where the viewer has to crane his or her neck to read them. Find a way to align all text within your vision line. This doesn’t only contribute to the arrangement and the visual quality of the output but this is also important in increasing your gantt chart’s comprehensibility.
Charts that contain a huge amount of data are not easy to deal with and arrange into a neat pile of data on a single layout. However, it’s a highly recommended tip to only use a single page for your data. Multi-paged charts can be pretty confusing, and it’s hard to keep track of continuous information flow in different pages. To fix this, try resizing your chart into much smaller yet readable sizes. If that’s impossible, break your data into smaller portions, and if you’re keeping them on your MS Excel spreadsheet, connect them by using hyperlinks.
While charts and graphs may overlap at a certain point, there isn’t a significant difference between the two. Charts present valuable data to readers in the form of a diagram, table, or even a graph. A graph, on the other hand, shows the mathematical relationship between data sets through a visual format. In other words, all graphs are considered to be a chart, but not all charts are graphs.
There are numerous types of charts according to its structure and purposes, but here are the most common varieties:
William Playfair, a Scottish political economist, introduced the pie chart, bar chart, and line chart from 1786 to 1801.
In any way and form charts are used, they’ve proven to be a valuable supporting detail in any report or presentation across any industries. The data-gathering process that comes with the need to fill out its spaces is already tedious enough. Let us take care of your chart design for you. Take your selection from our extensive collection of high-quality chart templates. They are made into different purposes to fit your every need. Download now!
